Hello, I am new to unraid and have not started a system yet but doing some research.  Seems like zfs is available now.  Should i setup a new system of unraid with zfs for pool, parity and cache? any advice wound help greatly thank you.

There is no simple answer to your statement.   ZFS had advantages in some scenarios and disadvantages in others.    You perhaps need to give some information about your expected usage, and also about the size of server you are thinking of setting up to get informed feedback.

I am looking to start a 18tb parity and two drives of 18tb and 14tb with 1 tb nvme cache

using for media and back for home and work files on intel 12th gen cpu

If those are the only drives you are going to start with then it looks like the you will have a standard main Unraid array of 1 parity drive and 2 data drives.   At the moment using ZFS in the main array is bad from a performance perspective so you probably want to avoid using it there at this point in time.

 

In terms of the SSD if it is going to be used as a pool for caching and/or other purposes then ZFS is certainly a viable option there.

Looking around, I found this on the FreeNAS website:

 

    https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/freenas-without-ecc-ram.73669/

 

Since this thread is a bit old, I had a look in the Unraid Manual and could not find any ZFS repair procedure outlined to discuss the problem of data recovery should an error occur.  So you might want to do a bit of thinking about ZFS in the array.  If you have followed the forum for any period of time, you would have seen many instances where disk corruption on other formats was corrected without the loss of data. 

 

 

I'm still learning quite a bit. I've been playing with rebuilding my main box and using a secondary Data ZFS array. And just setting up my main array with just a single SSD drive formatted in ZFS. I've come to this understand that the product can be so custom fit for almost any design. ZFS has great benifts but for small scale setups I would only recommend using it for the cache arrays and maybe 1 drive the the main array.  I had to go back and rethink about things and look at the product name and the intial intention of UNRAID. And I think the main focus on the product unraid. It was never intended to be a raid array.

The creators of unraid designed the systems main array so you could loose some drives and still not loose all your data in your main array. 
They also designed it so you could set shares up to only write to certain drives. And then certain drives will not be used writing all the time and your I/O could be better in some cases depending on the design. You could save the spin life on some drives in some cases.

But if your only going to use 3 spin drives for your main array. I wouldn't waste much time into ZFS thinking unless its for the cache drive or drives. I mean I might format one of the drives in the main array for zfs and zfs for the cache drives. and that's only so I could could follow Space Invader's recent video series for auto snap shots and ZFS backups etc..  But to be honest depending how your using the cache drive or drives you could do many ways to backup and recover. 

And the great thing is you can redo and change your setup latter. You might find that you want to experiment with VM's or lots of dockers etc..  Over all this product can be very customized to fit almost any idea. And you could make it with a little bit hardware or a lot. And there any many here that can offer ideas to fix issues. 

So seems that 3.5 inch hard disk for array should still be setup as possible xfs and cache might benefit from zsf setup?  

looking for the most stable setup for data backup and also have the best speed for file transfers. 

This should help: https://unraid.net/blog/zfs-guide