ZFS installs on HD with 4k physical blocks without any warning as on 512 block size device

Yuri yuri at rawbw.com
Thu Aug 18 17:50:06 UTC 2011


Some latest hard drives have logical sectors of 512 byte when they 
actually have 4k physical sectors. Here is the document describing what 
to do in such case: 
http://ivoras.net/blog/tree/2011-01-01.freebsd-on-4k-sector-drives.html .
For UFS: newfs -U -f 4096 /dev/da0
For ZFS: gnop create -S 4096 /dev/da0 && zpool create data /dev/da0.nop

I am sure most people just install such hard drive without doing this 
and potentially get suboptimal performance since they aren't aware about 
this.
Shouldn't UFS and ZFS drivers be able to either read the right sector 
size from the underlying device or at least issue a warning?

Yuri


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