[OpenIndiana-discuss] Are there any issues re ZFS on 2TB disks (from WD??) with large blocksizes?

[Matt Connolly]

Here's my experience:

On 07/02/2011, at 11:31 PM, Piotr Jasiukajtis wrote:
> On Feb 7, 2011, at 1:13 PM, Robin Axelsson wrote:
> 
>> Could someone enlighten me as to what is wrong with WD's disks, and particularly what's wrong with their EARS disks?
> 
> 1. They emulate 512b with a big write performance hit. 
> Workaround is to use patched zpool or use zfs sync=disabled, however you will not use patched zpool on a boot zpool.

I have a simple setup with 2x SATA drives: 1 x Samsung Silencer HD154UI and 1 x Western Digital Green WD15EARS.

The write performance of the WD is so bad that the entire system becomes totally unresponsive, sometimes for minutes at a time, while the drive catches up with a massive backlog of writes. (Read performance is fine.) Symptoms are exactly the same as the first post in this thread:

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop/Poor-performace-in-OpenSolaris-with-4K-sector-drive-WD10EARS-in/td-p/20947

I stil get these symptoms with OI-148.

> 2. They spin down heads every 8 seconds.

This particular problem can be overcome by using the WD3IDLE command to defeat this behaviour.

> 3. I have seen a few bad sector reports and bad heads on those drives.

I haven't seen any read/write errors in `zpool status` ever. (nearly one year old).


I'm not going to get another WD * EARS drive.



-Matt