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Date:      Wed, 4 Nov 2009 09:19:13 +0000
From:      krad <kraduk@googlemail.com>
To:        Steve Polyack <korvus@comcast.net>
Cc:        Derrick Ryalls <ryallsd@gmail.com>, FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: ZFS disk replacement questions
Message-ID:  <d36406630911040119v6254d21ehbf3963b90eb1e84b@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4AF08A42.9000900@comcast.net>
References:  <d5eb95fc0911030937n15bc2c9h73866ca6c7788216@mail.gmail.com> <4AF07493.7050208@comcast.net> <d5eb95fc0911031132g264182c9qf1c4d51bb1ea2086@mail.gmail.com> <4AF08A42.9000900@comcast.net>

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2009/11/3 Steve Polyack <korvus@comcast.net>

> Derrick Ryalls wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 10:21 AM, Steve Polyack <korvus@comcast.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Derrick Ryalls wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> 1) In the event of a disk failure, how do I trace back the name such
>>>> as adX to a physical drive in the enclosure?  Is there a way to take
>>>> the drive offline then use atacontrol to spin it down or something so
>>>> it is easy to identify?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> In my opinion you are best off using glabel(8) to give names to the
>>> disks.
>>>  This way you can name them in a way that makes sense to you.
>>>  Additionally,
>>> when you create the ZFS pool you will use the glabel'd names.  This means
>>> that the pool will still come up properly if something causes your
>>> devices
>>> to be numbered differently (i.e. a drive dies and you happen to reboot
>>> the
>>> system).
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I believe ZFS does this automatically.  Supposedly, if you take a
>> working set of RAIDZ drives from one machine and put it in another,
>> ZFS will figure out the drives since they get labelled by ZFS
>> internally.  My question concerns how to identify the physical disk in
>> question based on the adX or glabel name?  Different name in software
>> is fine, but if the drive fails I want to make sure I pull the correct
>> drive.
>>
>>
>>
> This is possible, but I don't remember reading that ZFS handles this
> anywhere, and I've seen glabel(8) recommended elsewhere for the same reason.
>
> Either way, you can add your drives one-by-one and label them on the
> enclosure "arraydrive00" and then glabel the individual disks with the same
> name.  This way when ZFS tells you "arraydrive03" is dead/offline, you can
> look at your enclosure and pull the drive with the arraydrive03 label.
>
>  Depending on your controller it is also probably worth it to use one of
>>> the
>>> SATA-specific drivers in FreeBSD 8 - these are ones like ahci(4) and
>>> siis(4).  While the generic ata(4) driver will work for pretty much
>>> everything, the updated AHCI drivers can take advantage of some more
>>> features.  Enable the modules at boot to use them.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I will look into it, thanks.  The machine in question is 2 year old
>> hardware currently with a 3ware raid card.  I will be going software
>> raid only, but FreeBSD already recognizes the eSATA drive I have
>> attached as a backup device so I know the O/S can at least talk to
>> sata drives attached to the mobo.
>>
>>
>>
>
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One thing to note about resilvering; unlike most raid systems zfs knows what
is going on at the filesystem level as well as block level. Therefore when a
drive has to be resilvered, only the data on the drive is rebuilt rather
than every block as with most other raid subsystems. eg if you have a 1TB hd
but only have 20 Gig of data, only 20 gig is copied/rebuilt rather than 1 TB
of data if you were using gvinum/gmirror. This massively speeds up rebuild
times and stress on the other drives. However the fuller the drive the less
the benefits



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