OpenZFS on OS X

hi all, I am experimenting with an external drive before migrating anything. I noticed that my system starts to go very slow and lock up when I actually try and make use of the drive by reading/writing. Is this because it is in a single drive setup?

hi all, I am experimenting with an external drive before migrating anything. I noticed that my system starts to go very slow and lock up when I actually try and make use of the drive by reading/writing. Is this because it is in a single drive setup?

What are you using to connect the drive? If you are using USB with an external, I (and others) have always found it fairly unreliable, slow performance, prone to lock up. I've used both Thunderbolt and Firewire800 with reasonably good performance, others have used eSata I believe.

FadingIntoBlue wrote:

hi all, I am experimenting with an external drive before migrating anything. I noticed that my system starts to go very slow and lock up when I actually try and make use of the drive by reading/writing. Is this because it is in a single drive setup?

What are you using to connect the drive? If you are using USB with an external, I (and others) have always found it fairly unreliable, slow performance, prone to lock up. I've used both Thunderbolt and Firewire800 with reasonably good performance, others have used eSata I believe.

USB...I figured i would test it first as i dont have to reboot. To be clear, this is not dedupe eating up my ram, its just the USB part making it slow? I assume dedupe is not enabled by default. I have way too much storage to implement that.

Also: how do I reformat a drive back to HFS? It won't let me in disk utility.

Also: how do I reformat a drive back to HFS? It won't let me in disk utility.

Yes I've had some fun times trying to do it in disk utility - I usually reformatted as ExFat or NFTS then deleted and tried to reformat to HFS+. Would take me a few tries. Make sure it is not mounted in Finder using ZFS, nor one of its directories open as the current working directory in terminal.
If you are OK in the terminal, use tools like gdisk. http://rodsbooks.com/gdisk/ NB not gDisk!