[OpenIndiana-discuss] Hitachi 4 TB disks + HP Microserver + OI 151 + ZFS

[Gordon Ross]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 8:46 PM, Richard Elling
<richard.elling at richardelling.com> wrote:
>
> On Apr 29, 2012, at 11:45 AM, George Wilson wrote:
[...]
>>
>> Speaking of 4K sectors, I've taken a slightly different approach that fixes this outside of ZFS. The idea is to allow sd to override the physical-block-size which ZFS will pick up. The way this works is you can specify the Vendor/Product id in sd.conf. Here's an example:
>>
>> sd-config-list = "NETAPP  LUN, "physical-block-size:4096";
>
> This is the preferred solution and there are several implementations running
> around in various stages of test/release/acceptance. I look forward to getting this
> upstream :-)
>  -- richard

Providing a work-around in "sd" is great.  We should do that, at least.

But is it sufficient?  What happens if I replace a mirrored drive with
512 byte sectors with one having 4k sectors?  What if I want to plan
ahead for that?  Maybe in only some of my ZFS pools but not all?
It would seem that a pool-level override for "ashift" might also be useful.

Gordon