Failing drive and swap shoots/kills FreeNAS processes

[Ericloewe]

Instead of using a swap partition to use part of the space, shouldn't it be possible to use a small empty partition?

Yeah, but you'd have to replicate FreeNAS' layout. I'd let FreeNAS create swap, unmount the pool and delete the swap partition.

 

[danb35]

That's not a very good idea, since the swap is there, in part, to allow slightly smaller drives to be resilvered. Say 3TB-10KB instead of 3TB.

I saw someone post here not too long ago that this had changed. In the past, drive sizes weren't standardized, so a "100 MB" drive from Seagate, for example, would not necessarily be the same capacity as a "100 MB" drive from Quantum. Apparently the manufacturers have now agreed on a standard, so that a "2 TB" drive is going to be the same reported capacity, whether it's a Seagate, WD, HGST, or whatever. I remember seeing a link supporting this, but I'm not able to find it at the moment.

If capacities of modern drives are more standardized, a large part of the rationale for the swap partition goes away.