I have maintained my data in different formats and in if the copies I have is in ZFS form.

Platform of choice is macOS. Figured I wanted to repurpose a Mac mini. For reasons I won’t go into the base OS has to be macOS.

I used a hypervisor for both Truenas Scale and StarWind. Both use ZFS and Debian (the later is Ubuntu).

I have 2 copies so accidental nuking of my array isn’t stressful and with thunderbolt only the drives are a bottleneck. Restoring is a non issue.

macOS ZFS volumes install features that truenas Scale doesn’t like. StarWind can create pools with out issue and can be mounted in macOS and vice versa.

Why does Scale create Linux partitions on each drive like traditional Linux raid when using ZFS? Mac ZFS will not import and explicitly complains about the Linux partitions. StarWind does not do that and it’s easy to imp/exp.

I would love to give truenas ago but “custom” partitions reduces portability. Scale is not Arm64 ready and when I sunset my intel macs I’ll have arrays I can’t migrate because of a software lock-in.