Ah, I hear you, and sorry you had that experience. GUI controls of ZFS aren’t usually very intuitive.

Also, ZFS assumes it has direct access to the block device, and certain USB implementations (not UAS) use ~sync~ operations that sit between the HAL and userland somewhere. So ZFS likes direct-attached storage, it’s a caveat to be sure.

If you ever change your mind, klarasystems.com/zfs/ has a ton of reading and tutorials on ZFS.