How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS

Re:How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, Tr... by traches on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @06:41AM (#48830227)

ZFS handles drive failures more robustly than anything else. There's a reason synology uses mdadm under BTRFS instead of the built-in BTRFS RAID features, and mdadm operates at the device level. That means that to replace a drive, mdadm has to rebuild the entire drive while zfs will only rebuild what's actually in use.

> Also, any guide like this that doesn’t guide you through “disk 3 failed, this is how you safely replace it” is imho incomplete, even if it doesn’t go through telling you how you know a disk has failed.

`zpool replace my_pool disk3 newdisk`

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Re:How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, Tr... by bobmcnamara on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @07:30AM (#48830560)

The worst part of either approach is: how do I find disk number 39 out of 48.

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Re:How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, Tr... by throwaway270925 on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @02:23PM (#48835462)

By using /dev/disk/by-id when adding them to the pool - and looking at the physical label on the disk itself. All disks I ever worked with had that ID printed somewhere on there.

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