[OpenIndiana-discuss] Drive compatibility

[Jay Heyl]

I had a bit of a hiccup last week with my zfs pool. It's a ten-drive raidz2
vdev. All the drives are Samsung F4s, though of two slightly different
models. Two of the drives showed up one morning as "degraded". In somewhat
of a panic I rushed out and bought a couple Seagate drives as replacements.
When I tried to do the actual replace operation zfs told me the new drive
was not compatible with the existing drive array. I don't recall the
wording of the error message.

I have since learned what I thought was complete disaster was zfs being
extremely cautious. I ended up clearing the errors and two subsequent
scrubs have turned up no errors.

Just in case, I bought some more Samsung F4 drives. Last night I installed
one of them as a spare drive. No problem. Then, since it was still mounted,
I designated the Seagate drive as a spare. Again, no problem. Since I know
it doesn't like the Seagate drive for use with this array, this tells me
mounting a drive as a spare doesn't check to see if the drive will really
work as a spare.

Is there any way short of actually doing a zpool replace to determine if a
drive will be truly compatible with an existing vdev?