I have looked at space invaders tutorial and believe I followed that quite well - I did the following steps - create a new cache pool (name cache, zfs, mirror, two devices) and assigning two empty (no filesystem) disks.

 

When I start the array the disks are expectedly shown as unmountable. I  specify that I want to format unmountable array disks but this does NOT result in them getting partitioned/formatted instead it finished more or less immediately with no error message and the disks still "unmountable".

 

I can add that I previously have had a BTRFS cache pool working perfectly on the same hardware and that I have a non-cache ZFS pool that was created without any issues. The hardware have worked perfectly up to now so I think the risk of hardware problems is very low (recently did extensive RAM test when motherboard was new, server have ECC memory etc).

 

 

What am I missing?  

 

Edited July 3, 20232 yr by NAS-newbie

See if it's not this:

https://forums.unraid.net/bug-reports/stable-releases/create-zfs-pool-with-3-way-mirror-fails-r2450/?do=getNewComment&d=2&id=2450

Mine reads "1 group of two devices" and this is ok right?

 

I can actually mention that about a week or so ago I managed to create a ZFS cache pool (I tried several things then also before it worked like first formating the disks for ZFS before adding them, leaving them empty etc.) so not sure how I did it to finally succeed but then I used "default settings" and was burned by same thing as customer in the referenced thread i.e. I got RAID0 (not a good default) and that was the reason I had to recreate the pool again (after all the usual steps to empty it etc) but now it does not work again and with these correct settings I can again figure out how to make it work.... 

Edited July 3, 20232 yr by NAS-newbie

21 minutes ago, NAS-newbie said:

now it does not work again and with these correct settings I can again figure out how to make it work.... 

If you read the thread the problem happens if you select the filesystem/pool type before assigning the devices, start over and chose the fs/pool type only after assigning the devices.

Sorry missed that "root cause" and yes it was indeed the problem - must say it is really unexpected and odd that this makes a difference - I would even go so far as saying the other (non-working) order is the more intuitive than the one that work....
To avoid more users having this problem I would really try fixing this and please also change the default - at least for a cache pool and probably even in general on UnRAID I would guess an alternative with redundancy is by far the most likely the desired (and the one with the least "catastrophes" risk if selected by misstake). 

An odd thing I noticed that even with my RAID0 cache pool the shares placed on it (cache only) was shown as "green" (that I interpreted as "protected") even though they was in reality highly insecure to a single disk failure. Due to this I did not notice the problem until I realized that the size of the cache array was to large for using mirror...
 

Edited July 3, 20232 yr by NAS-newbie

1 hour ago, NAS-newbie said:

To avoid more users having this problem I would really try fixing this and please also change the default

Both have been reported and should be fixed soon.