ZFS - 512b or 4KB Drive?

[shanester]

I am trying to decide on which 2TB drive to go with in a 6 drive ZFS RAIDZ2 pool.
HITACHI 5K3000 HDS5C3020ALA632 or SAMSUNG F4 HD204UI?

I really like the Samsung F4s but there are so many conflicting posts regarding 512b vs 4K drives in ZFS. What are the FACTS??

 

[Flintstone]

I've used 20 F4EG drives in my raid for a long time now. They work great for my use. Fast and stable.

 

[TypeRazor]

Ive got 26 5K3000 drives in multiple zpools and get over 600MB/s write in my 8 drive raidz2 pools
Couldnt be happier, considering they are $60 on newegg

 

[tdg]

Fact is ZFS works fine with whatever sector size you have, the problem is that hard drive manufacturers emulate 4k drives as 512 so the OS/ZFS never knows what the true sector size is and there is no way around this emulation. I've built ZFS arrays on both types and just setup my new RAIDz array on 5x 2TB Samsung HD204UI's on FreeBSD 8.2 and it works great. Just start a partition at sector 2048 (1 MB alignment) and then use gnop to create a 4k pseudo disk and build the array and everything is aligned properly. You can just build an array which is not aligned to the proper sector size and it will work fine, it just won't have optimized performance.