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ZFS on OS X 10.10

I don’t use this anymore, but kept the instructions here for future reference

I ran this to check my disk partitions:

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diskutil list

In the output below, you’ll notice I have a mac partition where OS X 10.10 Yosemite is installed. I made sure I didn’t use my whole drive.

After the installation and reboot, I added a ExFAT partition named tank using the Disk Utility app. This is the partition I will relabel/erase.

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/dev/disk0

   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER

   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *751.3 GB   disk0

   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1

   2:                  Apple_HFS mac                     250.0 GB   disk0s2

   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

   4:       Microsoft Basic Data tank                    500.4 GB   disk0s4

Then I installed OpenZFS_on_OS_X_1.3.0.dmg from OpenZFS On OS X

I took note of the IDENTIFIER of the partition I want to erase/use as ZFS: in my case disk0s4 and changed the label to ZFS with:

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diskutil eraseVolume ZFS %noformat% /dev/disk0s4

The output looked like this:

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Started erase on disk0s4 tank
Unmounting disk
Erasing
Finished erase on disk0s4 tank

I also verified my disk partitions to make sure:

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diskutil list

With the output that looked like this now:

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/dev/disk0

   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER

   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *751.3 GB   disk0

   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1

   2:                  Apple_HFS mac                     250.0 GB   disk0s2

   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

   4:                        ZFS tank                    500.3 GB   disk0s4

Then I created a zpool with:

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sudo zpool create tank /dev/disk0s4

And to verify it was created:

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zpool status

With output:

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

	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
	tank        ONLINE       0     0     0
	  disk0s4   ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

You’ll notice I didn’t use FileVault under my zpool. I’ve tried using FileVault + ZFS and it was terribly slow. I’m going to attempt to use an encrypted sparse bundle on ZFS.

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