Create mirrors with different size disks

[rcstevensonaz]

I have a 2TB Western Digital and 2TB Samsung hard drive. One has slightly fewer sectors than the other... but ZFS would have no problem creating a mirror based on the smaller disk.

It is failing when I create a ZFS pool. In the system log:

Code: Select all

root: invalid vdev specification use '-f' to override the following errors: mirror contains devices of different sizes mirror contains devices of different sizes

There should be a check-box option that we can set to cause NAS4Free to use the '-f' option.

It would also be nice if the GUI could check sector size on the devices in a vdev and proactively warn the user that the drives have different sector sizes. In my case, I knew they were different; but many people assume 2TB = 2TB and would not know that this was even an issue. For those users, the current lack of message will cause them to spend a LOT of time chasing the wrong rabbits ... i.e. all the other posts about how to fix message "Error: The changes could not be applied (error code 1)" which are related to totally different reasons for the failure.

[raulfg3]

check option already exist:

1.jpg

[rcstevensonaz]

Doh. I missed that. Thanks.

So here is the other challenge... let's assume I missed that (which I did), and I click on the "Add" button. And then on the main screen hit "Apply". But that won't work... it will never work... but the system will keep telling me that I need to "Apply" the changes to take effect. But it will never work.

I think it would be helpful when you select the vdevs for the system to proactively display a warning that the vdevs contain drives with different sector sizes ("You have selected vdevs with drives that do not have the exact same sector count. Use drives with the same sector count or or select the 'force vdevs' option to proceed with creating pool using mixed drive sizes"). The "Apply" button could be grayed out until they either change the vdev selections or click the force button.

[kenZ71]

You can always create the pool from the command line with the -f option then sync the ZFS setup.

[rcstevensonaz]

Ken, agree that we can use command line (that is what I wound up doing before seeing the note that the 'force' option is already there).

But I believe that the page where you add pools was *still* showing that I had unapplied changes ... even though I manually executing the command and synched ZFS.

But, more important: the less-experienced user will not know the exact zfs command line to use; so this continues to be a confusing experience for them. I still think we could avoid this confusing situation simply by alerting the user that they are attempting to build with mis-matched drive sector sizes (even though both drives are "2 TB") and note that they must select the "force" option to succeed.