Hi,

I am looking to make the move to ZFS encrypted, what are the best ways of going about this? Considering unraid does not support multi arrays yet i guess the only way to do this is to setup an array on a temporary licensed unraid server and then move the data over the network?

Or is there any better solution that i didn't think of?

ZFS drives in the array are single device pools. ÌF you want a multi-device ZFS encrypted array then it has to be done as a pool.

58 minutes ago, itimpi said:

ZFS drives in the array are single device pools. ÌF you want a multi-device ZFS encrypted array then it has to be done as a pool.

So the official way of using ZFS is to have 1 pool per drive? do you have parity then? i definitely do not want the ZFS filesystem spread out over more drives, i like to keep the filesystem (jbod) so in case if extreme failure i can always just mount the single drives and extract the data.

2 hours ago, je82 said:

So the official way of using ZFS is to have 1 pool per drive?

That is automatic if you specify ZFS as the format for an array drive. Note that performance of ZFS in the main array is apparently not very good if you have parity protecting the main array, so is there a specific reason you want ZFS there? Note also that not all drives in the main Unraid array have to use the same file system as parity is file system agnostic since it works at the physical sector level.

6 hours ago, itimpi said:

That is automatic if you specify ZFS as the format for an array drive. Note that performance of ZFS in the main array is apparently not very good if you have parity protecting the main array, so is there a specific reason you want ZFS there? Note also that not all drives in the main Unraid array have to use the same file system as parity is file system agnostic since it works at the physical sector level.

Interesting, so you can have mixed filesystems in the same array? I never knew that. The main reason i would like to use ZFS is mainly bitrot protection, performance on the array is not crucial but considering its not the greatest for me as i am using dual parity with xfs encrypted maybe it would be a problem if its really really slow? So what usecase is mainly targeted for ZFS? I though most people used it for their main arrays?

You’re not going to have bitrot protection if you don’t use a proper zfs zpool using unraids pools.

Zfs disks in the main unraid array will not provide you any of zfs’s benefits you seek.

But yes the unraid array can use a mix of filesystems as they are independent disks from one another.

Most people use XFS in their unraid array as btrfs is (in my opinion) not great and zfs has no purpose as a single disk zpool which is your only option when used in the unraid array.

Edited October 26, 2025Oct 26 by MowMdown

8 minutes ago, MowMdown said:

You’re not going to have bitrot protection if you don’t use a proper zfs zpool using unraids pools.

Zfs disks in the main unraid array will not provide you any of zfs’s benefits you seek.

But yes the unraid array can use a mix of filesystems as they are independent disks from one another.

Most people use XFS in their unraid array as btrfs is (in my opinion) not great and zfs has no purpose as a single disk zpool which is your only option when used in the unraid array.

I see, thanks for letting me know, glad i asked!

what I do (and I think many others do) is XFS in the main array s it seems best from a performance/resilience perspective, and then use something like the File Integrity plugin to get checksums that can be used to detect corrupt files. Note that this just detects such corruption but does not fix it. In fact the main array does not fix bitrot type corruption regardless of the file system used. Having said that many also use BTRFS in the main array to have built-in bitrot protection as BTRFS does not seem to suffer from the same performance penalty that ZFS in the main array does.

The target use case for ZFS in Unraid is really for redundant multi-device pools that can give good performance and simultaneously detect and correct any file level corruption. It is not as flexible as the main array in adding new drives but for many the performance criteria is more important. The reason for using ZFS in the main array tends to be to support ZFS snapshots from ZFS pools.