From owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jul 30 08:02:52 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 10E0B1065673 for ; Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:02:52 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from 000.fbsd@quip.cz) Received: from elsa.codelab.cz (elsa.codelab.cz [91.103.162.4]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CC7728FC0A for ; Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:02:51 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from 000.fbsd@quip.cz) Received: from localhost (localhost.codelab.cz [127.0.0.1]) by elsa.codelab.cz (Postfix) with ESMTP id B666119E023 for ; Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:02:50 +0200 (CEST) Received: from [192.168.1.2] (r5bb235.net.upc.cz [86.49.61.235]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by elsa.codelab.cz (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 9FC1619E019 for ; Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:02:48 +0200 (CEST) Message-ID: <48902042.3030609@quip.cz> Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:03:14 +0200 From: Miroslav Lachman <000.fbsd@quip.cz> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 X-Accept-Language: cz, cs, en, en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: ZFS on whole disk vs. slice vs. partition? X-BeenThere: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Filesystems List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:02:52 -0000 Hi all, I am preparing myself to next try with ZFS and I would like to know if there are any recomendations / performance differences between using whole disk device (ad0) or slice (ad0s2) or partition (ad0s1e). For example, if I have machine with 2 disks and I want to setup small part of the disk gmirrored with UFS2 (/ + /usr) and the rest of space for data on ZFS mirror - is it better to use ad0s1 + ad1s1 for gmirror and ad0s2 + ad1s2 for ZFS mirror? Or is it better to use ad0s1e + ad1s1e for ZFS mirror? Next example could be machine with 4 disks (1TB disks in RAIDZ / RAIDZ2 as array for backups). It would be nice to user ad0 + ad1 + ad2 + ad3, but then I cannot boot of it, so again - I can use small piece of each disk as bootable UFS2 root with gmirror of 4 drives (first slice of each disk - ad0s1, ad1s1, ad2s1, ad3s1) and the rest for ZFS. Or is there significant reason not to split disks, use whole device for ZFS pool and setup UFS2 root on some other media like CF card with CF 2 IDE convertor? Thanks for any useful informations, tips, trick, links etc. Miroslav Lachman