Best way to configure 6 drivers ZFS pool

Operating Systems & Open Source
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Hi All,

I’m new to ZFS, and I’m planning my ZFS array and would love to hear your thoughts.
This server will be deployed at my parent’s place, and used mostly as backup of my home server, being that I live far, having the least amount of maintenance/greater redundancy would nice. I also will run a single game server, which will mostly hit the 100gb ram ARC I believe, so I’m most interested in reliability and performance, being fine with losing the bulk storage.

I’m planning it to have 6 2TB-ST2000NM000A, and looking at my options, I’m divided between:

  • RAIDZ2 of 6 drives, seem to be the most reliable but lest performant option.

  • 2 vdevs comprised each of 3x raidz1 disks. From what I’ve read, it’s the best option for performance and reliability

Are those the best options for my setup? I’ve also read that I could make 3x mirrored vdevs of 2 disks each, but this seems prone to failure in case of a rebuild.

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Do you already have those 2TB drives kicking around? Otherwise I’d definitely consider 2 higher capacity drives in a mirror for a backup server.

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the 2 VDEV configuration also gives you the ability to increase pool capacity by changing 3 drives at a time instead of 6.

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It’s the sweetspot for performance if you don’t like mirrors. 2+1 RAIDZ is solid and you get 67% storage efficiency which is good. 3x mirror will be more performant, but you only get 50% instead of 67%.

3-wide RAIDZ and mirrors can both lose one drive per vdev. So that’s a wash between those two.

I wouldn’t bother with 2TB drives anymore. SSDs have higher capacity these days…Watt/TB is really bad. Usually you go for 16-20TB drives or SSDs.

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