OK, this post may not be for the faint of heart…put on your propeller beanies, because here we go.
Jim Laurent over at Sun has a really cool post over on his blog about using a VMware Fusion hosted Solaris 10 virtual machine to play around with the open source ZFS file system and a trio of USB sticks to make a poor-man’s Raid-Z array using USB sticks instead of actual hard drives.
So if you ever had a dream of using your Mac to make yourself a redundant array of inexpensive disks using USB sticks, but without having to deal with RAID-5’s write hole (ed note: what a great name), well, now you know what you’re doing this weekend.
You can see a more advanced version of what Jim did with his VMware Fusion Solaris VM and three USB sticks demo’d by some german colleagues of his in this video, where they use three separate USB hubs, each with four USB sticks in it, to demonstrate the redundancy of zPools and ZFS in a RAID-Z configuration.
Are your propeller’s spinning yet?
