if I pick up and shuck three 8TB hard drives and maybe three more later what raidz levels should I use to be able to expand but also have the best parity and space.
This whole strict balancing limitation is tough. I hope they add a more flexible way to do this even though it’s only really beneficial to us home users.hmm, 3 drives would likely be raidz.
then you might be able to convert to 3 mirror vdevs an a pool, if you add 3 more drives.
kinda like raid10, for performance and fault tolerance
-j
That is the practical approach. Debating on building a setup to serve as a datastore for my Plex media and also as one for other things like VMs and source control etc. in the latter case dedup and compression would come in handy.What are you storing, is it mostly static or fluid? If its static say, media then you may want to explore something like snapraid where you can add and remove disks as you want, you can have 1 to 6 parity disk. Its snapshot based so any data that is changed between snapshots will be lost, so if you need realtime protection then it is not the solution for you.