ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

[Volodymyr Kostyrko]

28.01.2013 01:57, james:
> I have a 9.1 system with some SATA disks in RAIDZ, upgraded from 9.0.
>
> The disks are all the same type, and I formatted them for FreeBSD and
> put ZFS in a slice covering most of them.
>
> I have seen suggestions for OpenIndiana etc that it is better to let ZFS
> have the whole raw disk and that this can control the way it manages the
> disk writeback mode.

My home computer is set up in the dedicated mode. No grave difference. 
Not even a scratch.

> Does this apply to FreeBSD and ZFS too?

No.

> Presumably the disks are currently FreeBSD-specific.  If I used raw
> disks instead of slices, could I read them from a Solaris system too?

I'm mostly sure you would be able to read disks from Solaris/x86. 
However Solaris/Sparc uses another labeling scheme. If you want to be 
fully compatible with other system GPT is a better choice.

-- 
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.