WD20EARS and ZFS pools

[adampower]

How should I build my zfs pools?

Hi all. Eons ago I build a little NAS box which will soon come back to life as a FreeBSD ZFS storage system.

I just bought 5 x wd20ears drives as they were on sale for $99 each. I currently have a smattering of 1tb drives (Seagate lp and wd10eacs and a cav black). How should I build my zfs pools?

Should I:

a) Use 4 or 5 1tb drives in a pool and stripe with the 5 wd20s in another pool?
or
b) build a pool with 2x1tb and 3x2tb and stripe it with 3x1tb and 2x2tb?
or
c) 3 pools???
or
d) ???

Should I use 4 of each and keep one of each in reserve in case of disk failure? I do not require 10tb of storage for the foreseeable future but... the price was right and my wife was in a good mood.


I'm still not real clear on how zfs deals with this type of situation. Is there a preferred method or do I just go ahead and put everything together and let zfs figure it out?

 

[adampower]

Bump

Hmmm I stole this from sub mesa on a different thread

So a simple pool could be:
pool: test
vdev1: disk1

While a more complex pool could be:
pool: complex
vdev1: raidz1 disk1 disk2 disk3 disk4
vdev2: raidz1 disk5 disk6 disk7 disk8
vdev3: raidz1 disk9 disk10 disk11 disk12

Then... Ultimately I would like to have one 'pool' or drive letter for the entire nas. It seems to me these vdevs are striped with one another? I too am trying to get a handle on ZFS and will simply have to play with it for a bit. First though, I bought an SSD for my wife's laptop (the cost for letting me buy a bunch of 2tb disks) and I should set it up for her.