Creating a VDEV from (5) 4TB HDD and then including it in a mirror with 7 other 18TB HDD. Is this possible? I can’t find this specific scenario on the interwebs anywhere.
What kind of mirror? ZFS, mdadm, … ?
Not directly, ZFS VDEVs can only be striped together, not mirrored. And they cannot contain other VDEVs. Unfortunately.
What you can do is partition the 7th 18 TB drive into five parts of 3.6 TB each and pair each partition with one of the 4 TB drives into mirror pairs. So the 7th 18 TB together with the five 4 TB drives creates 5 VDEVs that you can stripe into the pool.
It might be a good idea to put the weird 5x4+18 drives into a separate pool though, since it will have different performance characteristics - and what do you do when a 4 TB drive fails? Get another 4 TB drive to replace it? Seems … unwieldy. Edit: might want to create 4x4 TB pool and save one of the 4 TB drives as a spare, at that.
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