I am a casual home user of Unraid. I started with it, because I was looking for a way to digitize my many paper documents and store them at a safe place - a typical application case for a NAS.

In addition, I found running applications from the server (as VM or even more efficient with a docker container) is a nice addition and let's me starting using Nextcloud, etc...

 

Then there came the introduction of Unraid 7 and the possibility to use ZFS as a file system and I became searching for information about it. I am not a IT-specialist by profession, perhaps (at max) an ordinary user interested in t0echnology. As such, I like to know as much as possible about the technology, before I would actually use such "new technology" like ZFS...

Well, I decided not to use it currently, because I do not need it's features at this moment, but I found an article, which I found very interesting. Searching for ZFS (as a search word) in the Unraid forum showed me, that seem to be not many Unraid users which favor mirror vdevs, like it is advised in this article - my forum post is therefore mainly to bring this article to your attention. Perhaps some real IT professionals with ZFS experience can comment on this issue - as the article is rather old already (2015) but it advises and explains usage with ZFS on whatever system, not Unraid specific:

https://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs-not-raidz/

 

I found this information rather useful

 

 

 

Striped mirrors are still recommended if you need IOPS, raidz has the same IOPS of a single disk, so for database, VMs, etc, that is better, but if you plan to store mostly media files for example, raidz is a better option, it can be faster for writes and will have much better storage efficiency, it just depends on the use case, also since that article, raidz pools can now be expanded.

Thank you for pointing out RaidZ expansion with the release of OpenZFS 2.3 early 2025

Will that feature be implemented already with the release of Unraid 7.1 ?

12 hours ago, ullibelgie said:

Will that feature be implemented already with the release of Unraid 7.1 ?

You can do it using the CLI for now, there's still no GUI support, but that should be added soon:

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/46802-faq-for-unraid-v6/page/4/#findComment-1537164

 

Many thanks for info and the link...