[OpenIndiana-discuss] 4k sectors again

[Cyril Plisko]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 10:53 PM, Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk <roy at karlsbakk.net>wrote:

> Hi all
>
> Seems most drives are moving to 512-bytes-on-4k-sectors these days, as
> with the new 7K4000 drives from Hitachi. I saw a patch for zpool some time
> back, fixing ashift, but that's all. Is there an official fix somewhere?
> What do people with 4k drives do?
>

If the drive reports its block size as 4K ZFS will do the right thing
already. Only drives that lie about the actual block size and report 512
bytes are problematic.
For such drives the technique I found useful is to create a pool on some
other devices that are true 4K and then replace the devices one by one with
the problematic drives.
COMSTAR comes really handy for such a trick. Also Linux ZFS let you specify
ashift manually during pool creation.


-- 
Regards,
        Cyril