RFC: Suggesting ZFS "best practices" in FreeBSD

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Peter Jeremy <peter at rulingia.com> wrote:

> On 2013-Jan-22 17:27:13 -0800, Michael DeMan <freebsd at deman.com> wrote:
>


> >#2.  Ensure a little extra space is left on the drive since if the whole
> drive is used, a replacement may be a tiny bit smaller and will not work.
>
> As someone else has mentioned, recent ZFS allows some slop here.  But
> I still think it's worthwhile carving out some space to allow for a
> marginally smaller replacement disk.
>

I'm somewhat interested in this point.  Not that we should miss a few meg
on a multi-terrabyte disk, but in my recent experience, all the drive
manufacturers seem to "agree" on the number of sectors for a certain size
of disk.  I'm just not sure we need to leave for the allowance of a smaller
disk.  larger (than required) disks already work anyways.