[OpenIndiana-discuss] ZFS improvements.

[Maurilio Longo]

taemun,

I've made some tests with WD10EARS disks (1Tb disk, 4Kb sectors reported as
512b), I've used four of them in a raidz1 zpool to keep a copy of around 20
sparse zvols I'm exporting through comstar.

To make the story short, for sparse zvols (I don't know what happens with non
sparse zvols) with sectors of 8Kb in size, moving them from a real 512b
sectors disk (zpool) to a 4kb one, there is around 30% of space wasted.

I suspect that for every 8Kb block of data in a zvol, zfs adds a sector of
'administrative' data, which on 4Kb sectors disk is mostly wasted (compression
does not help a lot here, since you'd have to have 8kb of data which can be
compressed down to (less than) 4kb to have any space saving).

So, I'm going to recreate the pool with the standard zpool command even if it
is going to be a little slower and keep using real 512b disks for the time being.

Best regards.

Maurilio.

PS. here you can find a zpoolm command compiled with ashift=12 which works on
OpenIndiana:

http://digitaldj.net/2010/11/03/zfs-zpool-v28-openindiana-b147-4k-drives-and-you/

PPS. Even a compressible zfs filesystem (source tree of snv release 143) when
moved to 4Kb zpool adds around 30% of wasted space.


taemun wrote:
> If we're making a wishlist, something more immediate (and surely easy to
> implement) would be a command line option for zpool create to change the
> ashift value. This allows use of "Advanced Format" drives which have 4KB
> internal sector size, and export them (incorrectly, for Windows XP) as 512B
> blocks.
> 
> eg
> zpool create -o ashift=12 tank c1t0d0 c1t1d0
> 
> This would provide immediate benefit to anyone wanting to use modern cheap
> hard drives, where the user is compus enough to know what the system can't.
> 
> A more advanced option would be timing of read/write performance of
> increasing block sizes (and offsets, if needed) in order to identify what
> the physical sector size is (and its alignment). But purely manual is a good
> start.
> _______________________________________________
> OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
> OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
> 

-- 
 __________
|  |  | |__| Maurilio Longo
|_|_|_|____| farmaconsult s.r.l.