ZFS disk replacement questions

[Steve Polyack]

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).

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.
> Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
>
>