Hiya, i've installed two nvme's to act as my cache. They replace two smaller SSDs, which were encrypted. I cannot figure out how to encrypt the new drives. These instructions tell me:

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Go to the Main tab.

Stop the array.

Select the drive.

In File system type change the file system to the encrypted type that you want.

Select Apply to commit the change.

 

 

1. Is that when the disks are already in the pool? Or when they're in 'unassigned devices'?

2. How does one "select the drive"?

3. In what i assume is the "select"ed drive (i clicked "cache"), my "file system type" is greyed out. It says "btrfs" but gives me no ability to change anything about it.

 

 

OK. Well i figured it out. The TLDR is:

 

Delete the pool, create a new one, only add ONE DISK, set btrfs encrypted, THEN add the second disk to the pool.

 

Here's the full procedure i used. Maybe it can be done slightly differently, but it worked for me.

 

1. With an empty cache pool (no disks assigned) - delete the pool.

2. Clear any partitions from the unassigned devices that will be used in the cache pool.

3. Create a new pool.

4. Set the pool slots to ONE disk.

5. Assign the first disk only to the pool.

6. Click on the word `cache` - choose the filesystem type - btrfs Encrypted. (password is taken from the array password automatically), click DONE.

7. There will be an open orange coloured padlock next to the word cache.

8. Change the pool slots number to 'TWO' disks.

9. Add the second disk. It will automatically acquire the values set in the first disk.

10. START the array.

11. The open orange padlock remains, and the disks are identified as "Unmountable: unsupported or no file system"

12. Scroll down - below the STOP array button there is a greyed out FORMAT button.

13. Check the disks on the left include ONLY the disks you want to include in the pool.

14. Click "Format will create a file system in all Unmountable disks" - YES I WANT TO DO THIS

15. Click OK to the warning.

16. Click Format.

 

It will take a moment to format the disks. If everything worked ok, the open orange padlock will change to a green open padlock.

 

It *should* now be good to go.

 

Could the official instructions maybe have rather more information about how to do this procedure? Or perhaps there are official instructions, somewhere else?

So i had the case that I needed to move from btrfs - raid10 - to zfs raidz1, because I needed to remove 1 of my 4 ssd drives. Basically these were the steps i followed:

• stop all dockers and shutdown VMs
• disable docker and VM in settings
• copy /mnt/cache over to my array
• stop array
• disallocate cache drives to 'no device' for each slot
• click on the 'cache' link of the first 'Pool Devices' line and click [remove pool]
• create new pool with fs and raid type of your choice (I chose 'zfs-encrypted' and raidz1 with 3 devices)
• click on the red x on the right of each drive that goes to the pool to clear disk. This deletes the data on this disk! (THIS STEP WAS IMPORTANT AS IT OTHERWISE ALWAYS USED POOL SETTINGS FROM BEFORE)
• start array (it will say that cache pool cannot be used due to unmountable disks)
• scroll down and tick the chackbox to the right of [format] where it says that some disks couldnt be mounted due to not being formatted or so (I dont remember the correct wording here, as I don't wanna do it again ^^)
• now your cache pool should be online and each disk has been luks-encrypted (at least in my case). You can check that by stopping the array and disallocating a disk. Now at the 'unassigned devices' area there should be a 'luks' label in the 'FS' column. Reallocate again in cache pool after checking.
• move backup from array back to /mnt/cache
• enable docker and VM in settings

As far as I can remember those were the steps that were needed in the end (after lots of trial and error). The weirdest part was that unraid always used the old cache structure - btrfs and raid10 - without clearing the disks beforehand, as it didn't reformat those by itself. I had to clear so that unraid got forced to reformat. Or I think you can manually format each disk with FS and optionally encryption of choice and then create the cache pool. 

Hope that helps others that have a similar case

On 3/13/2025 at 2:48 AM, luhzifer said:

So i had the case that I needed to move from btrfs - raid10 - to zfs raidz1, because I needed to remove 1 of my 4 ssd drives. Basically these were the steps i followed:

Thanks for these instructions; worked perfectly for me to encrypt my BTRFS RAID1 cache pool.

Edited February 7Feb 7 by zbot