Like you, I'm thinking if I'm going to have that much trouble when pulling a disk, its looking like a large blemish on the usability of zfs for my NAS server.
At the moment, the OpenSolaris ZFS experience seems to be rather hardware dependent. With Sun hardware, I haven't had any problems, but a particular ASUS board required setting a lower memory frequency before the zpool error counters remained at zero. A Tyan based box I've built has been working just fine from the start. I don't think it's a ZFS problem, but a driver problem instead. I've detached/attached many mirror sets, but all on supported/certified hardware.
I'll admit that I'm not the sharpest kid on the block and have massive holes in my knowledge/graso of what I'm trying to do, but it seems like there has been just on big pain in the butt after another.
I don't know which components you've used, and if these parts work fine in other people's systems, but your description does not breed confidence in this particular card. Of course, there's also BIOS settings, firmware, bus mastering problems, ... Can you tell us more about your system, or did you do so already? I'm new here :)
Also seems like it requires a rather extensive knowledge and skill set to work with zfs.
There are only two utilities, zpool and zfs, and both come with well written manual pages. There's a ZFS Administration Guide on docs.sun.com that describes many common tasks. It's not as easy as an Apple product or a consumer level NAS server, but they won't protect your data integrity, support efficient snapshotting, etc. On the other hand, configuring Linux LVM or md software RAID is more complicated in my experience, and so on. I don't know what your frame of reference is, so I can't tell what you'd consider "extensive". Let us know if we can help in any way.
Best, Hans NL _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
