Identifying Storage Requirements

The pool describes the physical characteristics of the storage. You must be create the pool before any file systems.

Before creating a storage pool, determine which devices will store your data. These devices must be disks of at least 128 MB in size, and they must not be in use by other parts of the operating system. Allocate entire disks to ZFS rather than individual slices on a preformatted disk.

For more information about disks and how they are used and labeled, see Using Disks in a ZFS Storage Pool.