ZFS Pool of Mirrors vs Pool of Raidz?

[amacieli]

Yeah, I pay for BackBlaze for my truly critical stuff - no question - and I have separate copies all over the place. So that stuff’s basically never getting lost, unless we all get nuked or something. I also have my script that emails me every week with any SMART errors, so I can get ahead of any potential failures before things actually do go south. I see this, and the Z2, basically buying me time in case things start to go wrong, before drives fully fail.

[mabod]

@curtisspendlove

I don’t care at all about performance. The NAS this is going to be in won’t be able to load from the tiny pool of lanes fast enough to saturate Ethernet. (Probably)

If performance is of no concern why would you want to use NVME?

@curtisspendlove

My main concern is additional wear on the NVMe’s particularly for scrubs and potential (likely inevitable) resilvering if/when a drive fails.

Just go with rotating disc. I have very good experience with RAIDZ2 over several years with rotating disc in a JBOD USB case. Mirrors have the best performance while RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2 give you best price per TB.

@curtisspendlove

I think I’m going to order 3 x 4TB in Z1 as a learning experience and probably eventually add another separate 3x4TB (or whatever is reasonable storage cost) in the future.

That makes six slots in total. This could be 3 mirrors in RAID10 or 2x RAIDZ1 with 3 HDD each.
You could start with 1 mirror and add additional mirrors over time until you have filled all 6 slots.