freebsd stable - Oct 2009 - whats best pracfive for ZFS on a whole disc these days ?

just about to build a new ZFS based system and I was wondering
what the recommended way to dedicate a whole disc to ZFS is
these days. Should I just give it 'da1', 'da2' etc as I have
done in the past, or is it better to use GPT to create a
partition over the whole disc, which is marked as
being for freebsd-zfs ?

Not that I have had any problems with simply using bare
drives, but the phrase 'dangerously dedicated' does keep
nagging at me, hence considering the GPT route :-)

cheers,

-pete.

On Mon, 2009-10-26 at 11:19 +0000, Pete French wrote:
> just about to build a new ZFS based system and I was wondering
> what the recommended way to dedicate a whole disc to ZFS is
> these days. Should I just give it 'da1', 'da2' etc as I
have
> done in the past, or is it better to use GPT to create a
> partition over the whole disc, which is marked as
> being for freebsd-zfs ?
> 
> Not that I have had any problems with simply using bare
> drives, but the phrase 'dangerously dedicated' does keep
> nagging at me, hence considering the GPT route :-)
Others may have different opinions, but if your drives are dedicated to
zfs and you don't intend to try and boot from them, I see no reason not
to continue giving the whole disk to zfs.

robert.
> cheers,
> 
> -pete.
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-- 
Robert Noland <rnoland@FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD

On Mon, 26 Oct 2009, Pete French wrote:
> just about to build a new ZFS based system and I was wondering
> what the recommended way to dedicate a whole disc to ZFS is
> these days. Should I just give it 'da1', 'da2' etc as I
have
> done in the past, or is it better to use GPT to create a
> partition over the whole disc, which is marked as
> being for freebsd-zfs ?
>
> Not that I have had any problems with simply using bare
> drives, but the phrase 'dangerously dedicated' does keep
> nagging at me, hence considering the GPT route :-)
I put GPT's on mine and reserved a few Gb on each so I could swap/dump 
on them (4Gb on each - overkill but kept them all the same size).

Unfortunately it appears ZFS doesn't search for GPT partitions so if you 
have them and swap the drives around you need to fix it up manually.

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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