Mixing 4kn and 512e Drives in One ZFS Pool

[Brian Puccio]

From the perspective of a ZFS pool with ashift=12, what is the difference between a 4kn and a 512e drive? And are there any performance issues with mixing these two types of drives (all else being equal)?

Thanks!

 

[gea]

There is no difference.
ZFS handles the 512e disks like it handles 4kn as disks with a physical 4k sectorsize.

Only with older systems, you can cannot use 4kn as they need the 512b emulation mode.