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Why are my ZFS disks so noisy?
Earlier this year, a user at Practical ZFS asked a deceptively simple question: I have a Proxmox pool of three four-wide RAIDz1 vdevs. Whenever my VM is running, all twelve... Read More
Answering this “simple” question required so many digressions, it felt a bit like asking the user to build Johnny Cash’s Cadillac just so they could learn how to wash it! In a nutshell, each block –the fundamental unit of ZFS storage data, whose size is defined by the recordsize or volblocksize properties as appropriate–is split into n-p pieces, where n is the total number of drives in the RAIDz vdev and p is the parity level. By properly configuring our pool topology and block size, we can drastically minimize the number of seeks issued to our drive heads, which in turn makes them far less “chattery.” But we should also ask the question, “what if we just can’t hear them?”
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