RW ZFS and Leopard, my first impressions

Not long ago I posted about installing the RW ZFS beta seed on Leopard after updating to 10.5.1.

As I said after the end of that post, It does work. On the one hand I haven't had this many system
panics on a mac ever. On the other hand I have repartitioned my laptop and now have ZFS pools
mirrored to an external USB stick and a firewire drive.
Since the simple tests below I have re-installed to get more partitioning flexibility. I couldn't do a live
repartition to get the space I wanted. Every attempt to repartition after the first was informing me that
there wasn't enough space.


After pulling the drive but before directing any traffic to the pool:

errors: No known data errors

pool: pool
state: ONLINE
scrub: resilver completed with 0 errors on Mon Dec 3 15:44:43 2007
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
pool ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
disk0s3 ONLINE 0 0 0
disk1s1 ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

After initiating a scrub on the pool:

pool: pool
state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices could not be opened. Sufficient replicas exist for
the pool to continue functioning in a degraded state.
action: Attach the missing device and online it using 'zpool online'.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-D3
scrub: scrub in progress, 11.12% done, 0h1m to go
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
pool DEGRADED 0 0 0
mirror DEGRADED 0 0 0
disk0s3 ONLINE 0 0 0
disk1s1 UNAVAIL 0 0 0 cannot open

errors: No known data errors

zpool online pool disk1s1

Disconnect while writing files to the volume via rsync:

pool: pool
state: DEGRADED
status: One or more devices could not be opened. Sufficient replicas exist for
the pool to continue functioning in a degraded state.
action: Attach the missing device and online it using 'zpool online'.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-D3
scrub: resilver completed with 0 errors on Mon Dec 3 15:56:10 2007
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
pool DEGRADED 0 0 0
mirror DEGRADED 0 0 0
disk0s3 ONLINE 0 0 0
disk1s1 UNAVAIL 0 595 0 cannot open

errors: No known data errors

When the disk went offline the IO slowed (somewhat dramatically), when it came back online it also slowed (again dramatically for ~1-2s). The resilver started and writing data to the pool while resilvering slowed everything down a bit but nothing horrible.

More to come. On a day to day basis I am running iTunes and my music library on ZFS.

My first hint: I recommend turning off spotlight indexing on the ZFS volume it seems SIGNIFICANTLY more stable.