[OpenIndiana-discuss] Drive compatibility

[Rich]

I would guess the error you're having involves the devices having
different block sizes.

# ./smartctl -d sat -i /dev/rdsk/c7t5000C5003886DDA4d0s0
smartctl 5.42 2011-10-20 r3458 [i386-pc-solaris2.11] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate Barracuda Green (Adv. Format)
Device Model:     ST2000DL003-9VT166
[snip]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
# ./smartctl -d sat -i /dev/rdsk/c7t5000C500459476F2d0s0
smartctl 5.42 2011-10-20 r3458 [i386-pc-solaris2.11] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Seagate Barracuda Green (Adv. Format)
Device Model:     ST2000DL003-9VT166
[snip]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical


You can also look at zdb's output and see what the ashift value of the
disks in the pool is (it's a 2 << [ashift], so ashift=9 is 512b, =12
is 4096b,etc)

- Rich

On Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 4:41 PM, Jay Heyl <jay at frelled.us> wrote:
> 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?
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