Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-02-02 Thread james
On 28/01/2013 16:10, Paul Kraus wrote: I have been using ZFS with GPT partitions with no issues. I have NOT compared performance between whole disk and partitioned, which is where the difference in Solaris arises (ZFS makes better use of the physical drive's write cache). Well, it

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-02-02 Thread Adam Vande More
On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 9:51 AM, james ja...@mansionfamily.plus.com wrote: On 28/01/2013 16:10, Paul Kraus wrote: I have been using ZFS with GPT partitions with no issues. I have NOT compared performance between whole disk and partitioned, which is where the difference in Solaris

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-29 Thread Volodymyr Kostyrko
29.01.2013 04:37, Thomas Mueller: 28.01.2013 01:57, james: I have a 9.1 system with some SATA disks in RAIDZ, upgraded from 9.0. The disks are all the same type, and I formatted them for FreeBSD and put ZFS in a slice covering most of them. I have seen suggestions for OpenIndiana etc that it

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-29 Thread Paul Kraus
On Jan 28, 2013, at 9:37 PM, Thomas Mueller wrote: Presumably the disks are currently FreeBSD-specific. If I used raw disks instead of slices, could I read them from a Solaris system too? ^ I'm mostly sure you would be able to read disks from Solaris/x86. ^ However Solaris/Sparc uses

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-29 Thread Paul Kraus
On Jan 29, 2013, at 6:59 AM, Volodymyr Kostyrko wrote: Is GPT compatible with Solaris, can Solaris access a GPT disk? Yes. I'm not sure if it can boot off GPT disk but on Solaris zpool automatically creates boundary GPT partition to protect ZFS vdev. Under the Solaris-based OSes I

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-28 Thread Volodymyr Kostyrko
28.01.2013 03:36, Shane Ambler: On 28/01/2013 10:27, james wrote: I have a 9.1 system with some SATA disks in RAIDZ, upgraded from 9.0. The disks are all the same type, and I formatted them for FreeBSD and put ZFS in a slice covering most of them. I have seen suggestions for OpenIndiana etc

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-28 Thread Volodymyr Kostyrko
28.01.2013 08:05, Michael Sierchio: On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 5:36 PM, Shane Ambler free...@shaneware.biz wrote: I recall reading that using partitions for zfs on FreeBSD was as good as full disks. No, it isn't - ZFS can fully utilize disk caches when presented with whole devices. There are

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-28 Thread Volodymyr Kostyrko
28.01.2013 09:03, Steve O'Hara-Smith: On Sun, 27 Jan 2013 22:05:05 -0800 Michael Sierchio ku...@tenebras.com wrote: On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 5:36 PM, Shane Ambler free...@shaneware.biz wrote: I recall reading that using partitions for zfs on FreeBSD was as good as full disks. No, it isn't -

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-28 Thread Volodymyr Kostyrko
28.01.2013 01:57, james: I have a 9.1 system with some SATA disks in RAIDZ, upgraded from 9.0. The disks are all the same type, and I formatted them for FreeBSD and put ZFS in a slice covering most of them. I have seen suggestions for OpenIndiana etc that it is better to let ZFS have the whole

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-28 Thread Steve O'Hara-Smith
On Mon, 28 Jan 2013 11:40:53 +0200 Volodymyr Kostyrko c.kw...@gmail.com wrote: 28.01.2013 09:03, Steve O'Hara-Smith: On Sun, 27 Jan 2013 22:05:05 -0800 Michael Sierchio ku...@tenebras.com wrote: On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 5:36 PM, Shane Ambler free...@shaneware.biz wrote: I recall

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-28 Thread Warren Block
On Mon, 28 Jan 2013, Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote: There's one other good reason to use partitions when mirroring. When the time comes to replace a drive in a mirror it is necessary that the new drive be the same size (or larger) than the one it replaces. Given that drives of nominally the

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-28 Thread Paul Kraus
On Jan 27, 2013, at 8:36 PM, Shane Ambler wrote: I recall reading that using partitions for zfs on FreeBSD was as good as full disks. For a boot zpool we need to at least have a partition for the boot-code and one for zfs preventing the use of a full disk. I have been using ZFS with

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-28 Thread Thomas Mueller
28.01.2013 01:57, james: I have a 9.1 system with some SATA disks in RAIDZ, upgraded from 9.0. The disks are all the same type, and I formatted them for FreeBSD and put ZFS in a slice covering most of them. I have seen suggestions for OpenIndiana etc that it is better to let ZFS have the whole

ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-27 Thread james
I have a 9.1 system with some SATA disks in RAIDZ, upgraded from 9.0. The disks are all the same type, and I formatted them for FreeBSD and put ZFS in a slice covering most of them. I have seen suggestions for OpenIndiana etc that it is better to let ZFS have the whole raw disk and that this

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-27 Thread Shane Ambler
On 28/01/2013 10:27, james wrote: I have a 9.1 system with some SATA disks in RAIDZ, upgraded from 9.0. The disks are all the same type, and I formatted them for FreeBSD and put ZFS in a slice covering most of them. I have seen suggestions for OpenIndiana etc that it is better to let ZFS have

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-27 Thread Michael Sierchio
On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 5:36 PM, Shane Ambler free...@shaneware.biz wrote: I recall reading that using partitions for zfs on FreeBSD was as good as full disks. No, it isn't - ZFS can fully utilize disk caches when presented with whole devices. There are possible reasons to create partitions -

Re: ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

2013-01-27 Thread Steve O'Hara-Smith
On Sun, 27 Jan 2013 22:05:05 -0800 Michael Sierchio ku...@tenebras.com wrote: On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 5:36 PM, Shane Ambler free...@shaneware.biz wrote: I recall reading that using partitions for zfs on FreeBSD was as good as full disks. No, it isn't - ZFS can fully utilize disk caches