Choosing LBA Format For NVME drives and ZFS

OpenZFS
1

Hello All,

Looking for some information regarding the best 4k format to use with NVMe drives.

The list below shows a few options for formatting NVMe drives with 4k

LBA Format  0 : Metadata Size: 0   bytes - Data Size: 512 bytes - Relative Performance: 0 Best (in use)
LBA Format  1 : Metadata Size: 8   bytes - Data Size: 512 bytes - Relative Performance: 0 Best 
LBA Format  2 : Metadata Size: 0   bytes - Data Size: 1  bytes - Relative Performance: 0 Best 
LBA Format  3 : Metadata Size: 0   bytes - Data Size: 4096 bytes - Relative Performance: 0 Best 
LBA Format  4 : Metadata Size: 8   bytes - Data Size: 4096 bytes - Relative Performance: 0 Best 
LBA Format  5 : Metadata Size: 64  bytes - Data Size: 4096 bytes - Relative Performance: 0 Best

My main question has to do with when to use the “LBA Format 3”, “LBA Format 4”, and “LBA Format 5”.

Does anyone have any information which they can share on this? Possible use cases, recommendations and any caveats?

Thanks!

2

You want LBA format 3. With the others the metadata space is intended for something like Data Integrity Field - Wikipedia. ZFS does not use that.

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3

@mgerdts Thanks for the info and the link.

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