ZFS on whole disk vs. slice vs. partition?

[Pawel Jakub Dawidek]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 10:03:14AM +0200, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am preparing myself to next try with ZFS and I would like to know if 
> there are any recomendations / performance differences between using 
> whole disk device (ad0) or slice (ad0s2) or partition (ad0s1e).
> 
> For example, if I have machine with 2 disks and I want to setup small 
> part of the disk gmirrored with UFS2 (/ + /usr) and the rest of space 
> for data on ZFS mirror - is it better to use ad0s1 + ad1s1 for gmirror 
> and ad0s2 + ad1s2 for ZFS mirror? Or is it better to use ad0s1e + ad1s1e 
> for ZFS mirror?
> 
> Next example could be machine with 4 disks (1TB disks in RAIDZ / RAIDZ2 
> as array for backups). It would be nice to user ad0 + ad1 + ad2 + ad3, 
> but then I cannot boot of it, so again - I can use small piece of each 
> disk as bootable UFS2 root with gmirror of 4 drives (first slice of each 
> disk - ad0s1, ad1s1, ad2s1, ad3s1) and the rest for ZFS. Or is there 
> significant reason not to split disks, use whole device for ZFS pool and 
> setup UFS2 root on some other media like CF card with CF 2 IDE convertor?
> 
> Thanks for any useful informations, tips, trick, links etc.

There should be no difference whatsoever performance-wise between using
disks, slices or partitions on FreeBSD.

-- 
Pawel Jakub Dawidek                       http://www.wheel.pl
pjd at FreeBSD.org                           http://www.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD committer                         Am I Evil? Yes, I Am!
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