I've been using unraid for years, and the turnkey ability to use disks of differing sizes was the first and biggest reason I went with unraid and it has been pretty good. 

I originally looked at freenas/truenas as it was also a turnkey nas that had the bonus of ZFS (not that i fully understand ZFS) but not being able to add disks of varying sizes was a deal-breaker.

 

Now it seems unraid supports ZFS but I'm ashamed to admit that its not fully clear to me what advnatages of ZFS the newest unraid leverages. I have read the announcements but i guess my techno incompetence is limiting my understanding. I need to build a new box and transfer the licsnese over to the new box so really want to understand ZFS on unraid better.

 

I have a small box that I put truenas on so am trying to learn it, eventually I'd like to have that small box be one of my offsite backup boxes.

 

So, for my new unraid/zfs box, would I be able to do things like snapshots and zfs-send to my backup box while still having the unraid advantage of using different size disks? Would vdevs still have to be made using disks of the same size (like on truenas)? Would unraid using zfs be able to take advantage of things like copy on write, sync writes, inline compression, etc?? Would I be able to use tools like sanoid/syncoid?

 

Thanks in advance.

1 minute ago, Stumpy said:

while still having the unraid advantage of using different size disks?

With Unraid you can use zfs with the array or with pools, each has is own advantages and disadvantages, see here for the main ones:

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/131857-soon™️-612-series/?do=findComment&comment=1243850

 

 

Doh, thank you, I apparently missed that thread.