There are number of issues that can lead to this error when trying to boot a FreeBSD server with ZFS as root / zroot: ZFS failed to read pad2 area of primary vdev There can be a few reasons for this error, but check these in order: “Phantom” Pool: Make sure you haven’t added any… Read more »
Goodbye MB/GB/TB, Hello MiB/GiB/TiB
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Since the popular rise of the personal computer users have asked the time old question: “Why does my 100 gigabyte hard drive only give me 93 gigabytes when I format it?” The answer lies with the 2nd use of the word “gigabyte” in that sentence. In reality when we say “gigabyte” we don’t mean 1,000,000,000 bytes,… Read more »
HOW TO: FreeBSD Partition Alignment for RAID, SSDs & 4k Disk Drives
Friday, July 6, 2012
Last Updated January 21st, 2017. This article is really popular, I’ll do my best to keep it up to date! I’ve added notes about enabling TRIM support. Aligning Partitions Under FreeBSD for Optimum Performance with RAID Arrays, SSDs and 4k Disk Drives Note: These instructions have been verified to work for FreeBSD 9.1, FreeBSD 9.2,… Read more »
HOW TO: Installing FreeBSD with gmirror (software RAID 1) and the GPT partitioning scheme
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Last Updated November 14th, 2016: Updated to include that this works under FreeBSD 11.0 as well. Really anything between FreeBSD 9 and 11 should work. April 30th, 2015: This article is really popular, I’ll do my best to keep it up to date! I’ve added notes about TRIM, alignment and GMIRROR (-h) labeling since it… Read more »