New to ZFS

I am new to zfs please help me with all the information you can provide

My next project is to upgrade my Dell r710 6x10 4tb unraid array. I will be purchasing a Dell r730xd 24x2.5 +2 system and ill be working with 900-1.2tb sas drives. I wanted to know if its more beneficial to have multiple smaller vdevs in a zpool or 1 large vdev in a zpool. Ie, 8disks x 3 vdevs or 3 disks x 8vdevs in one pool.

This will mainly be used for file storage, media storage for plex, game storage, and esxi vm storage.

If this use case is not recommended please help me in the right direction. I have a dell r420 with 4x3.5 drives as my esxi host. I was thinking about moving the 4tb disks to this machine if truenas would work better without the esxi vm files.

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Hi!
There are many ways to set up ZFS pools, depending on the use case.

As you are new, I would recommend not using more than half your capacity till you are comfortable, and making sure you have a copy of the data on the other half.

Then if it all goes wrong, you are not scuppered.

Later on, you might use that storage as an actul backup, once you have the system running fine, and you have practiced recovering from faulted drives and stuff.

There is a good primer series:

And a bunch of actual guides on the zfs website:
https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/index.html

But personally, I really gained a lot from the books by Allan Jude and Michael Lucas:

There are a bunch of websites, and even some tips on the forum here:

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