ZFS - whole disk or partition or BSD slice?

[Volodymyr Kostyrko]

29.01.2013 04:37, 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?

Yes. I'm not sure if it can boot off GPT disk but on Solaris zpool 
automatically creates boundary GPT partition to protect ZFS vdev.

>
> 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.

Except OI. https://www.illumos.org/issues/208

-- 
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.