ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

[Thomas Mueller]

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.

Responses from Vladimir Kostyrko ^ :

^ 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.

Is GPT compatible with Solaris, can Solaris access a GPT disk?

I tried OpenIndiana installable live USB stick, and my Western Digital 
Caviar Green 3 TB hard disk, partitioned with GPT, was not recognized or
readable; same was true for Western Digital My Book Essential 3 TB USB 3.0
hard disk, also partitioned GPT.  This was on amd64 system.


Tom