Hello everyone! I'm looking to set up a new Unraid system with a ZFS pool. I plan to use three NAS hard drives along with a 1 TB NVMe drive intended for caching. From the documentation I've come across, it seems that even when using ZFS for all disks, one still needs to maintain a separate drive/disk in the array. Is this correct?

 

I've been unable to find a guide that specifically covers setting up a ZFS-based Unraid system from scratch. If anyone could share some tips, guides, or resources on this, I would really appreciate it. Thanks in advance for your help! 

51 minutes ago, donglobal said:

it seems that even when using ZFS for all disks, one still needs to maintain a separate drive/disk in the array. Is this correct?

The issue is not using zfs for all, you can also use zfs for the array, but for now, at least one device must be assigned to the array if you want to only use pools, an old flash drive will do it.

2 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

The issue is not using zfs for all, you can also use zfs for the array, but for now, at least one device must be assigned to the array if you want to only use pools, an old flash drive will do it.

Thanks Jorge, but How would l use ZFS for the array and also have an old flash drive in there as well?  Would I get the benefit of speed that a pool of disks formatted in ZFS would get if I do it this way? Or is it just worth waiting until the next version of Unraid which apparently will have a full implementation of ZFS to do my install? I'm a bit lost as to whats the best way forward for now. I currently have my data in Truenas Scale and used to using an equal number of disks of the same size,  but I don't like its limited application support and having to jump through hoops just to get to configuration files, here is where Unraid really shines. 

21 minutes ago, donglobal said:

but How would l use ZFS for the array and also have an old flash drive in there as well?

If you want to use zfs won the array you don't need the flash drive.

 

21 minutes ago, donglobal said:

Would I get the benefit of speed that a pool of disks formatted in ZFS would get if I do it this way?

Not in the array.

 

22 minutes ago, donglobal said:

Or is it just worth waiting until the next version of Unraid which apparently will have a full implementation of ZFS to do my install?

Nest release will still require an array device assigned, at least that's the last I heard, but you can already do a full zfs implementation, if like mentioned, you use a flash drive to fulfill the array device requirement.