Windows pool

zpool create

Creating a pool for use with Windows, it is recommended to use casesensitivity=insensitive and normalization=formD as it has better compatibility.

The ZFS commands need to be run as Administrator so start your favourite shell, be it bash or CMD.exe and start it with "Run as Administrator".

Disk device

For example:

 # Powershell
 Get-WmiObject Win32_DiskDrive

 # List Disks available - wmic is being removed, find alternative.
 wmic diskdrive list brief   

 # Create pool on disk 1 named tank.
 zpool.exe create -O casesensitivity=insensitive -O normalization=formD -O compression=lz4 -O atime=off -o ashift=12 tank PHYSICALDRIVE1

VHD Virtual Disk

You can also start Partition Manager and create a VHD or VHDX device. It will attach a PHYSICALDRIVEx to a plain file. Create the pool as above.

File-based Pools

For quick testing or playing around with ZFS, a file-based pool is really easy. On Windows, you can create a sparse empty file, then create a pool on it.

# fsutil file createnew C:\data\poolfile.bin 200000000
# zpool.exe create tank C:/data/poolfile.bin

and remember, to import it again, you need to supply the directory the file is in.

# zpool.exe import -d C:/data/ tank