View Single Post
Old 4th December 2009
phoenix's Avatar
phoenix phoenix is offline
Risen from the ashes
 
Join Date: May 2008
Posts: 696
Default

ZFS vdevs can be made from files on existing filesystems (only useful for testing), disk partitions (/dev/ad0s1d for example), disk slices (/dev/ad0s1 for example), or whole disks (/dev/ad0 for example). In fact, anything that you can create or access with GEOM, can be used to create ZFS vdevs.

However, to get all the benefits of ZFS, it should be used with whole disks.

To make things simple, as well, you should use glabel to label the disks/slices/partitions, and then reference the labels when creating the vdevs (zpool create storage mirror label/disk0slice0 label/disk1slice0, for example). That way, if you change disks, or change controllers, or whatever, ZFS will continue to work right away, without any manual intervention to get the device names sync'd.
__________________
Freddie

Help for FreeBSD: Handbook, FAQ, man pages, mailing lists.
Reply With Quote