[OpenIndiana-discuss] Installing OI on USB stick

[Reginald Beardsley]

--- On Fri, 3/1/13, Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:

> 
> Now, what about the other 44 small partitions? ;)

Huh?  You've got 9x5 disk arrays. So one 5 disk array has a 5 way mirror of 10 GB s0 slices to boot.  Why would you do this on the other 8 sets of disk?

For example, w/ 40x4 TB EFI label drives and 5x2 TB SMI label drives, out of 170 TB of raw space you're worried about allocating 50 GB to boot?  That's less than 0.03% of the total disk pool.  And it's still just ~$2.50US of disk space total cost which is certainly cheaper than a pair of 8 GB USB flash drives.

It would also almost certainly be better performance based on my experience w/ USB flash.

FWIW fmthard will not allow allocating slices that don't fall on cylinder boundaries.  Even if the "cylinder" is not an integer number of physical sectors.  So it would be easy for different drives w/ the same capacity to not readily match the size of a slice.  You can attach a larger pool to a vdev, but not a smaller pool. The unallocated space provides a bit of wiggle room.  It's actually mentioned in the Oracle recommended practices for ZFS.

Have Fun!
Reg