The author recently migrated back to Debian for better performance and flexibility, utilizing PCIe passthrough for Windows. They experienced persistent I/O errors while reading sectors from an old hard disk, despite SMART tests showing no issues. After forcing sector reallocation, the ZFS pool became inaccessible. Using gdisk to overwrite the corrupt partition table restored functionality.

I’m a huge fan of ZFS because of its performance and other features like snapshots, transparent compression. In fact I had switched to FreeBSD for servers just because it had native ZFS support. But as of Ubuntu 16.04, ZFS is officially supported for non-root partitions. Now I’m migrating a FreeBSD [...]