Mixed HFS/ZFS drive best practice?

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Mixed HFS/ZFS drive best practice?

Postby nodarkthings » Mon Mar 06, 2017 3:04 am

As I (very) slowly grow using ZFS, I'm facing a situation that may be not ideal, I bet:
I started using a one partition pool on an HD populated with many HFS partitions and all is quite fine.
Recently, I had the idea to experiment using all the wasted space in those HFS partitions and gathered them in a second ZFS pool.
My second scattered ZFS pool is mounting little more slowly but I believe it's only because of its scatteredness... :D

All is still doing fine, but I wonder if the best practice wouldn't have been to create ONE ZFS pool and then create TWO DATASETS, instead?
Performance wise, would it be a better choice or it doesn't matter at all?
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Re: Mixed HFS/ZFS drive best practice?

Postby Sharko » Thu Mar 09, 2017 1:46 pm

Yes, I think you would be better off to have one pool and two datasets. I think that in general ZFS is going to run best when it can optimize everything, and not work within the external constraints that you currently have (the arbitrary partition scheme). That being said, the degree of optimization might be insignificant if you're running an SSD, or slightly more significantly if you are talking about a spinning mechanical drive.
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Re: Mixed HFS/ZFS drive best practice?

Postby nodarkthings » Thu Mar 09, 2017 4:52 pm

I'll probably end up reorganizing all my partitions using more ZFS (and in a more standard way), but I'm wondering at this point if I wait for ZFS becoming bootable (seems pretty close, from what I've read)...
As I have at least 4 Mac OS partitions on one drive, I wonder if I'll be able to use ZFS on all of them or if only one per drive will be bootable...
Wait and see. :)
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