[OpenIndiana-discuss] zpool replace says the disk has a different sector alignment

[Francis Swasey]

I believe I have finally found the root cause, and if I am right, I would have had this issue no matter what.  I discovered when I finally got downtime on the system last Friday, that the IBM firmware upgrade included Seagate SAS drive firmware updates.  It has updated all the drives now to the same version that is on the new drive, and they are now logical blocksize of 512, but physical of 4096 - where before the reboot of the server, I was seeing logical and physical of both 4096.

I am proceeding to empty the zpool, so I can rebuild it.  Just as I would have needed to when the new drive showed up with this current version of the Seagate firmware installed on it.

Frank


On Nov 21, 2013, at 2:13 PM, Francis Swasey <Frank.Swasey at uvm.edu> wrote:

> On Nov 21, 2013, at 9:59 AM, Reginald Beardsley <pulaskite at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>> What OS release was the pool built with?  Could it be that an update has resulted in zfs not being willing to do what it did when the pool was created?  In that case rolling back to the BE that built the pool might let you add the disk in w/ ashift=9.  
> 
> It was EITHER built in RHEL6, and zfsonlinux and then imported on OI 151a8, or it was built on OI 151a8 - I seem to have misplaced my notes from that period :/
> 
>> 
>> However, I don't think that changes the need to rebuild the pool w/ ashift=12.  For ashift=9 to be correct prior to the firmware update, the controller would have to have been doing the RMW buffering internally.  It seems strange that they would remove such a feature.  You might want to look for messages in old log files from prior to the update if you still have them.  My notes don't reflect it, but I seem to recall that I managed to build  an improperly aligned pool, but did not see any console messages and was not looking at /var/adm/messages until performance testing showed very poor performance.  It may be you've stumbled across an old problem you didn't know you had.
> 
> I don't think they removed it.  I think (from what I'm told, though I haven't been able to find the document that the person said they were reading) that it is no longer the default setting - and the firmware upgrade was not "smooth" at all - and I haven't had a window when I could boot into the BIOS to check the settings and what options I have available to me there.
> 
> So, right now, I'm working on emptying off a pair of Nexsan SATABeasts (that are out of warranty) so I can swing them over to this system to give me just enough room to create a new zpool and I can migrate all this data there, then I can rebuild my existing zpool.
> 
> Frank
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