45Homelab HL8 is finally in hand and is my FrankenITX build

Hardware Hub Build a PC
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I just got the new (HL8) and I am making it a FrankenITX Built
I have 8ea 12tb HGST drives (sata), connected to an SAS 3008 HBA (in IT mode)
I also have a 960gb 905p and a few random 2tb ssd drives.
connectx3 Pro card with 40gb link to my main system and 10gb to my internal home network.

I am trying to decide if a 2ea 4 drive Raidz1 mirrored OR an 8 drive Raidz2?

Use case is backups, low power and quiet (compared to my 740xd or my dual 6180 xeon servers).
I do have an onsite backup drive, in a safe and a remote Qnap that backs up nightly

Thanks for any advice

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IMO the ZFS hype is on its last legs, as people start to understand ZFS is not the perfect FS it was purported to be.

Use a simple 8-drive RAID6. This’ll give you a 2-disk redundancy while maximising storage capacity (72TB raw). Best of all, in the event you loose 2 drives, no data is lost. On ZFS, any data stored on those drives will be lost :roll_eyes:

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It’s the best out there, ReFS is production ready but very proprietary

Definitely not, unless someone wants to plan on funding my next motorcycle purchase as I do RAID array recoveries every couple weeks for various enterprises.

ZFS has the advantage of being portable and far easier to recover, more resilient with transient errors, and performs regular data validation that no RAID controller does natively.

Simply not true, RAIDZ2 is software RAID without the RAID controller interfering with data operations.

PLUS checksumming for integrity validation.

I regularly encounter RAID arrays where the drives have trash data from media errors that the RAID controller did not (could not) validate.

In those instances the entire array is at risk.

With checksumming, you have a chance at recovering using metadata and checksums to rebuild via brute force.

Not cheap, but plausible.

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If it’s a backup target only, I might go with the 8x1 raidz2.

4x2 raidz1 and 8x1 raidz2 both work out to about the same amount of usable storage. The 4x2 setup could also tolerate losing two drives if you get lucky and it happens to be one drive from each vdev. The 8x1 setup can lose any two drives. The 4x2 pool should in theory provide more iops, but if you’re not using it for anything else and you want to be more defensive, then I’d probably go with the 8x1 pool.

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I went with raid10
This also gets snapshots and backed up daily, so not worried about data loss.

Thanks for everyone’s input