Using Disks in a ZFS Storage Pool
The most basic element of a storage pool is physical storage. Physical storage can
be any block device of at least 128 MB in size. Typically, this device is a hard
drive that is visible to the system in the /dev/dsk
directory.
A storage device can be a whole disk (c1t0d0) or an individual slice (c0t0d0s7). From management, reliability, and performance perspectives, using whole disks is the easiest and most efficient way to use ZFS. ZFS formats the whole disk to contain a single, large slice. No special disk formatting is required. With other methods, such as building pools from disk slices, LUNs in hardware RAID arrays, or volumes presented by software-based volume managers, management becomes increasingly complex and might provide less-than-optimal performance.
Caution:
Because of potential complexity in managing slices for storage pools, avoid using slices.The format command displays the partition table of disks. When
Oracle Solaris is installed on a SPARC® system with
GPT aware firmware, an EFI (GPT) label is applied to the disk. The partition table
would be similar to the following example:
Current partition table (original): Total disk sectors available: 143358287 + 16384 (reserved sectors) Part Tag Flag First Sector Size Last Sector 0 usr wm 256 68.36GB 143358320 1 unassigned wm 0 0 0 2 unassigned wm 0 0 0 3 unassigned wm 0 0 0 4 unassigned wm 0 0 0 5 unassigned wm 0 0 0 6 unassigned wm 0 0 0 8 reserved wm 143358321 8.00MB 143374704
When Oracle Solaris is installed on an x86 based system, in most cases a EFI (GPT) label is applied to root pool disks. The partition table would be similar to the following:
Current partition table (original): Total disk sectors available: 27246525 + 16384 (reserved sectors) Part Tag Flag First Sector Size Last Sector 0 BIOS_boot wm 256 256.00MB 524543 1 usr wm 524544 12.74GB 27246558 2 unassigned wm 0 0 0 3 unassigned wm 0 0 0 4 unassigned wm 0 0 0 5 unassigned wm 0 0 0 6 unassigned wm 0 0 0 8 reserved wm 27246559 8.00MB 27262942
In the output, partition 0 (BIOS boot) contains required GPT
boot information. Similar to partition 8, partition 0 requires no administration and
should not be modified. The root file system is contained in partition 1.
Note:
For more information about EFI labels, see About EFI (GPT) Disk Labels in Managing Devices in Oracle Solaris 11.4 .On an x86 based system, the disk must have a valid Solaris fdisk partition. For more information about creating or changing an Oracle Solaris fdisk partition, see Configuring Disks in Managing Devices in Oracle Solaris 11.4
.
Disk names generally follow the /dev/dsk/cNtNdN
naming convention. Some third-party drivers use a different naming convention or
place disks in a location other than the /dev/dsk directory. To
use these disks, you must manually label the disk and allocate it to ZFS.
You can specify disks by using either the full path or a shorthand name
that consists of the device name within the /dev/dsk directory.
The following examples show valid disk names:
-
c1t0d0 -
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0 -
/dev/tools/disk