First time poster! Sharing experiences

[bradlaue]

Hey all! New forum member here. I wanted to share my usage of ZFS on macOS for anyone interested -

I'm using:

- Mac Mini 8,1 (Intel) with 64GB RAM
- OpenZFS 2.1.0
- OWC ThunderBay 8
- 4x 10TB WD
- 4x 16TB WD

Currently using 4 vdevs each of which is a mirrored pair so the zpool currently totals ~52TB storage backing home labs and other storage. There are 5 datasets fo two ZVOLs formatted with APFS and exported over NFS (I'll migrate these back to ZFS datasets once the NFSv3 atime patches (which @lundman went to impressive efforts to find/fix) go into a followup release.

It's fairly vanilla, no compression or dedup enabled on any datasets, nothing too spicy.

I've taken the macOS version from 11.3 to 12.4 incrementally (skipped a couple versions in between) and haven't experienced any panics or other issues and the pool has returned to me after each OS update. Performance is stellar!

[beiriannydd]

Also first time poster.

This isn't my first experience with ZFS, that was on Linux when ZFS on Linux was new and I was looking for an easy way to shuttle VM snapshots around. For personal use, I've been using a Drobo 5n1 for years. It was so nice to just slot in drives to upgrade, I went through a 1TB to 3TB upgrade which was seamless... it wasn't fast but I loved my Drobo. Since Drobo went out of business, I have been dreading doing a storage replacement. Apparently without reason. Hot swap bays now actually work! I was blown away by how easy the process of getting up and running is now vs how things were then. I'd already added a 3rd party kext on the machine before, so all I had to do post installation was approve it and reboot. Once done,
`zpool create` and the drives were online... no lengthy silvering process... best volume storage experience ever. Added an l2arc ssd, created a volume and permissioned it and it was ready for syncing my old NAS files over to. So far very happy. Setting up sharing on the mac was equally straightforward. I am curious when "release candidate" promotes to release... it seems like it's been out a good while with no scary reports on here. Hopefully 2.3 will be released by the time that I want to add a disk to the zraid. I have plenty of headroom (3-4x current storage), so that should be the case.

[Mushbuddygoose]

Raidz expansion is already in the lastest release candidate. Have been playing with it last few days. Works flawlessly.