The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeNAS 8.3.0-BETA1. This is the first public release of the 8.3.0 branch of FreeNAS, which upgrades the underlying base system of FreeNAS to FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p7. This update brings with it Version 28 of the ZFS filesystem, as well as a number of updates to the drivers and utilities in the base system.
FreeNAS 8.2.0 brought with it the ability to install plugins; this functionality is present in FreeNAS 8.3.0 as well. At the moment, upgrading the plugin jail to the version included with FreeNAS 8.3.0-BETA1 will cause plugins to stop working and will require reinstallation and reconfiguration of all plugins to resume normal operation. Our recommendation at this time is to avoid upgrading working components of the plugin system.
ZFS Version 28 includes several features such as the ability to detach a dedicated ZIL device, triple parity RAIDZ, and deduplication. There are numerous caveats to using deduplication, please do some research into the possible caveats of using dedup before enabling it.
Upgrading an existing ZFS pool is a one way street, once the upgrade is done it is not possible to use older versions of FreeNAS, nor is it possible to downgrade your pool. This upgrade can be done by running zpool upgrade from the CLI, it is not done automatically via the upgrader, nor is there a way to do the upgrade from the GUI. Instructions can be found in this section of the upcoming 8.3 Users Guide.