Getting Started with ZFS on FreeBSD 10

ZFS is pre installed in FreeBSD. To start off with ZFS on FreeBSD, we would just need to start the service. To start the service, we would need to add enable the service in /etc/rc.conf.

Add the followinng line to /etc/rc.conf

zfs_enable="YES"

NOw that we have enable the service in /etc/rc.conf, we can now start the service using the following comamnd.

service zfs start

We can have a dedicated hard drive for zfs pool. Here in this case the drive is ada1(The drive attached to the second SATA port)

zpool create pool1 /dev/ada1

Now we can check if pool1 is mounted to /pool1 folder by using the command “df”.

root@bsd:/pool1 # df
Filesystem  1K-blocks    Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ada0p2   7705916 1772236  5317208    25%    /
devfs               1       1        0   100%    /dev
pool1        10708914      31 10708883     0%    /pool1

We can also use the mount command to check the details.

root@bsd:/pool1 # mount
/dev/ada0p2 on / (ufs, local, journaled soft-updates)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, multilabel)
pool1 on /pool1 (zfs, local, nfsv4acls)

We can get the status of the pool using the following command

zpool status pool1

The output will be similar to the following

  pool: pool1
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:

    NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
    pool1       ONLINE       0     0     0
      ada1      ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Now that we have done all the necessary tests, we can now try creating a file inside this zpool.

cd /pool1
touch testfile