RFC: Suggesting ZFS "best practices" in FreeBSD

[Warren Block]

On Tue, 22 Jan 2013, Borja Marcos wrote:

> 1- Dynamic disk naming -> We should use static naming (GPT labels, for instance)
>
> ZFS was born in a system with static device naming (Solaris). When you plug a disk it gets a fixed name. As far as I know, at least from my experience with Sun boxes, c1t3d12 is always c1t3d12. FreeBSD's dynamic naming can be very problematic.
>
> For example, imagine that I have 16 disks, da0 to da15. One of them, say, da5, dies. When I reboot the machine, all the devices from da6 to da15 will be renamed to the device number -1. Potential for trouble as a minimum.
>
> After several different installations, I am preferring to rely on static naming. Doing it with some care can really help to make pools portable from one system to another. I create a GPT partition in each drive, and Iabel it with a readable name. Thus, imagine I label each big partition (which takes the whole available space) as pool-vdev-disk, for example, pool-raidz1-disk1.

I'm a proponent of using various types of labels, but my impression 
after a recent experience was that ZFS metadata was enough to identify 
the drives even if they were moved around.  That is, ZFS bare metadata 
on a drive with no other partitioning or labels.

Is that incorrect?