FreeBSD-10.3 root ZFS

[James B. Byrne]

We have eight (8) 3Tbyte drives on a system upon which I am installing
FreeBSD.  The quest arises of whether one should simply grab all of
the disks or partition them to reserve a spare area.  The reason put
forth for partitioning is this statement in man zspool(8):


    zpool replace [-f]	pool device [new_device]

	 Replaces old_device with new_device.  This is equivalent
         to attaching new_device, waiting for it to resilver, and
         then detaching old_device.

	 The size of new_device	must be	greater	than or	equal to
         the minimum size of all the devices in a mirror or raidz
         configuration.

One can conceive of a 3Tb drive which has slightly more or fewer
accessible sectors than its nominal size.  If the zspool incorporates
a drive with fewer accessible sectors than average for its nominal
size and one seeks to replace it with a similar drive that has more
than average for the same nominal capacity then what is the result? 
Is the new drive accepted or rejected?


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James B. Byrne                mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca
Harte & Lyne Limited          http://www.harte-lyne.ca
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