Because your metadata blocks are sitting in the l2arc, presumably. That's not guaranteed to be the case though. A more modern zfs setup can use that nvme flash

Because your metadata blocks are sitting in the l2arc, presumably. That's not guaranteed to be the case though. A more modern zfs setup can use that nvme flash as a dedicated device for metadata/"small" blocks, without evicting them at the whim of the caching algo. https://forum.level1techs.com/t/zfs-metadata-special-device-z/159954 https://forum.level1techs.com/t/zfs-metadata-special-device-...