Matching disks

[CEH1934]

I am setting up a NAS which currently has 3X Seagate IronWolf 4TB drives (ST4000VN008). I have just freed up a standard Barracuda 4TB drive (ST4000DM04). I have read that drives in a ZFS pool should match in size and other characteristics. I looked up the specifications, and both these drive models have 4096 byte per sectors "physical emulated at 512 bytes per sector", which became standard across drive manufacturers from 2011 for backward compatibility. I have also read that it best to have ZFS use 4096 byte sectors rather than 512.

So, since these two drive models have the same capacity and sector arrangement, they differ only in other characteristics like rotation speed. Accepting that the Barracuda will probably fail sooner, would it be OK to add it to the ZFS pool (which is not set up yet)?

 

[mav@]

FreeNAS defaults to 4KB ashift by default any way to improve compatibility, so it is not so important whether you have 4Kn, 512e or 512n drives, all should work mostly the same, though matching geometry within a pool/vdev is good. Sure having different drives is not perfect, but the worst you should get is the performance of the slowest one.