Adding a wildcard for the all devices to use the 4K block size did indeed work and drastically improved the performance (and, I guess, life expectancy) of that SSD.
I also added "physical-block-size=512" entries for all traditional 512-byte block disks connected to this machine and they are running fine. The scrub speed on the SSD (only quick test I could think of to try sustained read and write) went from 160MB/sec to 250MB/sec. If I use 8K it doesn't change as much, but seems to be more constant. System has been running for a couple of hours and it's nice and snappy. Should I add a line to the OI wiki about the wildcard options? I didn't see them there last time I looked and they can be handy for newcomers and the like. Bryan On Mon, 6 Jan 2014 12:49:53 -0800 (PST) Reginald Beardsley <pulask...@yahoo.com> wrote: > Sadly yahoo mail makes a mess of replies embedded in the text :-( > > I'll have to try the 3 TB USB drive again. I certainly can't see any reason > that your wildcarding scheme shouldn't work. If there is a problem it's > probably a bug. > > There are so many lies being told about geometry that it's hard to say what > you should do. At one point I wound up with a partition that was not 4k > aligned if I started with cylinder #1, so I used #2 which was 4k aligned. > However, the 2k aligned partition seemed to work OK, so I'm not certain. I > wasn't willing to leave it that way to avoid wasting a little space. > > I can't think of any reason that 512B drives wouldn't work fine aligned to > larger boundaries. The only consequence I can see is some wasted space > which really isn't an issue given we're talking pennies per GB. I can't > imagine a performance issue that could result. > > It seems to me that the default alignment rules would give less trouble if > the alignment was to the most restrictive requirement. > > -------------------------------------------- > On Mon, 1/6/14, Bryan N Iotti <ironsides.med...@runbox.com> wrote: > > Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] sd.conf trouble and illumos bug #3220 > To: openindiana-discuss@openindiana.org > Date: Monday, January 6, 2014, 12:08 PM > > Hi Reginald, > > Thanks for your reply. > > In the end, I just booted from a live DVD and plugged that > drive in on my laptop using a double asterisk as the sd.conf > line and an 8k block size. A test pool create read back > ashift=13, which should be fine. > > Then I used format -e and fdisk to create a single Solaris > slice with start and end blocks that would fall on a > cylinder number that was divisible by 8 (I did it like for > 4K disks, if I'm wrong I'd like some input on that please). > > Then I created the rpool in the first slice and moved the > disk over to the final system, where I sent and received the > zfs datasets. Change menu.lst, install grub and I was done. > Working fine so far (160MB/sec sustained on a scrub, normal > wsvc_time and asvc_time in iostat). > > Would anyone see any problem in doing the sd.conf line > backwards, I mean masking all drives as "**" with a 4K > blocksize and adding entries for the other 512-byte drives? > What would happen if ZFS thought a 512-byte block device > used a 4K block size? Wasted space, performance issue, > errors? > > Thanks, as always, for any and all input. > > > Bryan > > > On Sun, 5 Jan 2014 16:10:58 -0800 (PST) > Reginald Beardsley <pulask...@yahoo.com> > wrote: > > > I can't comment on your particular issue which is why I > didn't respond earlier. However, I had trouble > getting a 3 TB Toshiba USB drive to work properly. I > spent a bunch of time reading the code that parses sd.conf, > but finally gave up and didn't go further. > > > > On reflection I wonder if the problem is a failure to > propagate the information about block size to ZFS correctly > under certain circumstances. I think it would be nice > if one could force ashift when creating a pool. > Automagic is nice, but there's often no substitute for human > intelligence. I spent a couple of days trying to > persuade OI to create a properly aligned pool before I gave > up. > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list > > OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org > > http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss > > > > > -- > Bryan N Iotti > > +39 366 3708436 > ironsides.med...@runbox.com > > _______________________________________________ > OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list > OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org > http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss > > > _______________________________________________ > OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list > OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org > http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss > -- Bryan N Iotti +39 366 3708436 ironsides.med...@runbox.com _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list OpenIndiana-discuss@openindiana.org http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss