Back when I was even less experienced in self-hosting I setup my media/backup server using a RAIDZ1 array and 3 x 8TB disks. It’s been running well for a while and I haven’t had any problems and no disk errors.
But today I read a post about ‘pool design rules’ stating that RAIDZ1 configurations should not have drives over 1TB because the chances of errors occurring during re-silvering are high. I wish I had known this sooner.
What can I do about this? I send ZFS snapshots to 2 single large (18TB) hardrives for cold backups, so I have the capacity to do a migration to a new pool layout. But which layout? The same article I referenced above says to not use RAIDZ2 or RAIDZ3 with any less than 6 drives…I don’t want to buy 3 more drives. Do I buy an additional 8TB drive (for a total of 4 x 8TB) and stripe across two sets of mirrors? Does that make any sense?
Thank you!
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Personally I’d just upgrade to RAIDZ2, and add as many disks to that as reasonably practical. To be honest, I fail to see any downsides to using four disks for this other than the storage inefficiency.