[SOLVED] Trouble Creating ZFS Pool

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JWill5018

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May 31, 2025
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I'm attempting to set up a ZFS RaidZ pool and I cannot get it to work for the life of me.

As shown in the attached images. The creation seems to go fine but then I get this error and have no idea where to go from here. Some guidance would be much appreciated.

Edit: The issues was a different size drive error. Just need -f to force it.
 

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I would say it's because of the different sized disks. Did you once try just the 3 toshiba ?
Better would be to do mirror of the 2x 8TB and 2x 10TB and have 1x 10TB as spare defined as raidz would be horrible slow for vm/lxc.
 
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You could copy that command and manually execute it with a additonal -n flag (dry run) to see a real error message.
 
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waltar said:
I would say it's because of the different sized disks. Did you once try just the 3 toshiba ?
Better would be to do mirror of the 2x 8TB and 2x 10TB and have 1x 10TB as spare defined as raidz would be horrible slow for vm/lxc.
Click to expand...
I was just looking to maximize the storage into a single pool but if I have to I can split it.
 
You don't need to split, do a mirror with 2 vdevs (like a raid10) and even with compression enabled the capacity isn't that bad.
 
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waltar said:
You don't need to split, do a mirror with 2 vdevs (like a raid10) and even with compression enabled the capacity isn't that bad.
Click to expand...
I'm new to this but in that config I have what like 18TB of usable storage? I'm looking for as much as I can get with some redundancy in case I do something stupid.
 
Impact said:
You could copy that command and manually execute it with a additonal -n flag (dry run) to see a real error message.
Click to expand...
Where would I place the -n in the command specifically? At the end, replace the -o, or somewhere else entirely?
 
One way would be zpool create -n -o ashift=12 .... I can't copy paste since it's a picture or I would have given you the whole thing.
You can also just leave it alone and run the command as shown. It should fail as well but it will probably tell you why.
 
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JWill5018 said:
I dont understand really what you mean. This should be possible to do from what I understand and at not that much detriment to the system.
Click to expand...
Sure, but the speed especially the IOPS (but also the available space) will be much lower on RAIDZ1 (especially without PLP SSDs) than what people expect from hardware RAID5 (especially with BBU) due to the additional features, safety and write amplification of ZFS.
This is fine for data but not so good for running VM/CTs and has left many people disappointed as the many threads on this forum will show.
Maybe you already know about this and took a well-informed decision or maybe there is no point in putting your mismatched drives in RAIDz1 as it will not meet your expectations afterwards.
 
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leesteken said:
Sure, but the speed especially the IOPS (but also the available space) will be much lower on RAIDZ1 (especially without PLP SSDs) than what people expect from hardware RAID5 (especially with BBU) due to the additional features, safety and write amplification of ZFS.
This is fine for data but not so good for running VM/CTs and has left many people disappointed as the many threads on this forum will show.
Maybe you already know about this and took a well-informed decision or maybe there is no point in putting your mismatched drives in RAIDz1 as it will not meet your expectations afterwards.
Click to expand...
So what do you recommend?
 
JWill5018 said:
So what do you recommend?
Click to expand...
Run your VM virtual disks on enterprise SSDs with PLP (maybe search the forum about those). I do realize people don't like recommendations that cost (more) money.
Maybe use hardware RAID5 controller or RAIDz1 (5x8TB) for large but slow storage, but I don't have experience with this.
Or run a ZFS stripe of two mirrors (like RAID10) with 2x8TB and 2x10TB and keep one drive as spare in case one of the other drives fails. Like suggested already in post #2 and post #6 (maybe it's good enough for your VMs).
 
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Impact said:
One way would be zpool create -n -o ashift=12 .... I can't copy paste since it's a picture or I would have given you the whole thing.
You can also just leave it alone and run the command as shown. It should fail as well but it will probably tell you why.
Click to expand...
Thank you sir or madam. The -n command just said to use -f basically
 
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