> From: zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org [mailto:zfs-discuss- > boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of andy thomas > > According to a Sun document called something like 'ZFS best practice' I > read some time ago, best practice was to use the entire disk for ZFS and > not to partition or slice it in any way. Does this advice hold good for > FreeBSD as well?
I'm not going to address the FreeBSD question. I know others have made some comments on the "best practice" on solaris, but here goes: There are two reasons for the "best practice" of not partitioning. And I disagree with them both. First, by default, the on-disk write cache is disabled. But if you use the whole disk in a zpool, then zfs enables the cache. If you partition a disk and use it for only zpool's, then you might want to manually enable the cache yourself. This is a fairly straightforward scripting exercise. You may use this if you want: (No warranty, etc, it will probably destroy your system if you don't read and understand and rewrite it yourself before attempting to use it.) https://dl.dropbox.com/u/543241/dedup%20tests/cachecontrol/cachecontrol.zip If you do that, you'll need to re-enable the cache once on each boot (or zfs mount). The second reason is because when you "zpool import" it doesn't automatically check all the partitions of all the devices - it only scans devices. So if you are forced to move your disks to a new system, you try to import, you get an error message, you panic and destroy your disks. To overcome this problem, you just need to be good at remembering the disks were partitioned - Perhaps you should make a habit of partitioning *all* of your disks, so you'll *always* remember. On zpool import, you need to specify the partitions to scan for zpools. I believe this is the "zpool import -d" option. And finally - There are at least a couple of solid reasons *in favor* of partitioning. #1 It seems common, at least to me, that I'll build a server with let's say, 12 disk slots, and we'll be using 2T disks or something like that. The OS itself only takes like 30G which means if I don't partition, I'm wasting 1.99T on each of the first two disks. As a result, when installing the OS, I always partition rpool down to ~80G or 100G, and I will always add the second partitions of the first disks to the main data pool. #2 A long time ago, there was a bug, where you couldn't attach a mirror unless the two devices had precisely the same geometry. That was addressed in a bugfix a couple of years ago. (I had a failed SSD mirror, and Sun shipped me a new SSD with a different firmware rev, and the size of the replacement device was off by 1 block, so I couldn't replace the failed SSD). After the bugfix, a mirror can be attached if there's a little bit of variation in the sizes of the two devices. But it's not quite enough - As recently as 2 weeks ago, I tried to attach two devices that were precisely the same, but couldn't because of the different size. One of them was a local device, and the other was an iscsi target. So I guess iscsi must require a little bit of space, and that was enough to make the devices un-mirror-able without partitioning. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
