1. ZFS and Partitions
- ZFS is a volume manager and filesystem in one. Unlike traditional filesystems (like ext4, NTFS, or XFS) that sit on top of partitions, ZFS works directly with whole disks or disk partitions.
- You can assign either a whole disk (e.g.,
/dev/sdb) or a partition (e.g.,/dev/sdb1) to a ZFS pool, but whole disks are preferred since ZFS can manage them better.
2. Using Partitions with ZFS
- If you must use partitions instead of whole disks, you can manually create them using
fdisk,parted, orgpart. - Example of creating a ZFS pool using a partition: bashCopyEdit
sudo parted /dev/sdb mklabel gpt sudo parted -a optimal /dev/sdb mkpart primary 0% 100% sudo zpool create mypool /dev/sdb1
3. Why Whole Disks Are Preferred?
- ZFS expects direct control over the storage device for features like checksumming, redundancy, and self-healing.
- Using partitions may result in alignment issues, reduced performance, or conflicts with other tools like
grubormdadm.