ZFS mirroring with Samsung F4 4k disks.

After building my NAS a few month ago, I had this feeling that I was missing something.

ZFS!
If I have a NAS then it should use ZFS or RAID.

So I bought two Samsung F4 2TB disks (4k sectors but reporting themself as 512-byte sectors to the OS) and mounted them in the case.

To get nice speeds using ZFS and 4k sector disks one must align the disks.
This can be done in many ways. I used gnop to make a "dummy" disknode for ZFS.
But first I labeled my new disks with glabel.

glabel label disk1 /dev/ada2
glabel label disk2 /dev/ada3

that means that we can use /dev/label/disk1 as reference to the disk instead of remembering what adXX the disk is reported as.

use camcontrol devlist and glabel status to figure out the names when doing the labeling.

To create a mirror ZFS using gnop.

gnop -S 4096 /dev/label/disk1
gnop -S 4096 /dev/label/disk2

zpool create tank mirror /dev/label/disk1.nop /dev/label/disk2.nop
zpool export tank
gnop destroy /dev/label/disk1.gnop
gnop destroy /dev/label/disk2.gnop
zpool import tank

Good reference:
http://ivoras.net/blog/tree/2011-01-01.freebsd-on-4k-sector-drives.html