Because of using Windows XP, I have collected a set of XP-compatible USB etcher tools: AnyBurn, DriveKey, IsoToUsb, RmPrepUsb, Rufus, WinSetupFromUSB, Easy USB Creator.

I need them to create a bootable MS-DOS stick for installing MS-DOS, Windown 3.11, 98SE, and XP onto a HP t5720 think client, with a boot menu by Grub4DOS.

* thin client :-)

if i set up a zfs mirror with 2 ssds... then add another vdev to the pool with 2 more ssds (mirrored). will the data balance?

or is that a situation where the data will stay camped out on the 2 disks unless it's copied back?

ah never mind. it seems like no

It won't be balanced immediately

yeah. i'll have to yank the 4 disks... well.. 3 actually. i had a 4TB ssd elsewhere that i'll use for it as well. no big deal. i was sort of planning on that regardless.

i guess that's a good thing considering i haven't been using that 4TB drive so it will be worn at a different interval as the rest... i need to cycle them out once a month or so just to avoid multiple drive wear.

if SSDs weren't so expensive now i'd probably have gotten more of them just to avoid having to do this.

I'm not sure I follow entirely

But anyway, adding new vdevs doesn't mean the data is immediately balanced; any newly written data should be, if both vdevs have free space, at least. Removing vdevs is non-trivial as zfs is a copy on write FS

ah. my point was that i was going to see about just making a mirrored vdev for a new pool then adding 2 more ssds later

but i'll just go ahead and wait until i can have all 4 disks in

Depending on what you want to do you might also want to have a look at zpool2

That one will be balanced even with two disks and once you add two more you'll have double redundancy

Macer: I was always known to have crazy amounts of SSDs over the last 10 years, but my inventory of spare SSDs will eventually run out over the next years...

There was a time where you could get smaller SSDs for insanely cheap, I still have some 16-64 ones somewhere...

Needless to say with todays SSD prices you better keep what you can. ;-)

Yup.

Wish I bought more when I had the chance.

But I was of the endless cheap ssd prices mentality. Then the AI bandwagon showed up. :(

My favorite story was Samsung not selling memory to Samsung. :)

That's the only cool thing about now.

there will come a time when the market gets flooded by used gear. Suspect it will have an impact on the market as well

you assume they're using commodityish gear.

I assume we need server gear

I guess that was the real misstake =)

their server gear is fairly proprietary

the GPUs aren't using commodity memory but they're usually hosted by rackmount kit with DDR5 RDIMMs