gptids are not symlinks to /dev/da*

[Michael Sierchio]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 4:50 PM, Chris Stankevitz
<chrisstankevitz at gmail.com> wrote:

> Okay, although I am a bit surprised to hear that a GPTID refers to a
> partition.  I'm using FreeNAS and I thought I instructed the zpool to
> consist entirely of unpatitioned disks.  I gather that FreeNAS is,
> somewhere in the process, creating partitions which triggers
> "structure creation" which creates unique GPTIDs.

It is an unfortunate feature of FreeNAS - it creates gpart tables and
reserves 2GB of every single disk for swap, leaving the rest for your
use (as part of a ZFS pool, for example). That's a flawed assumption,
which makes it less useful for enterprise deployment. My box has 48
drives, and I know where they are, and I don't want a disk to have an
identity other than its position in the array.  Doubly annoying
because ZFS really performs better when you present whole, raw disk
devices to it instead of partitions.

- M