One interesting use case for zfs is striping eg you add a bunch of left over disks with different speeds and sizes to a zfs pool, then zfs automatically optimiz

One interesting use case for zfs is striping eg you add a bunch of left over disks with different speeds and sizes to a zfs pool, then zfs automatically optimize. It can be used on for example dev machines where everything lives in repositories and all you care for is getting as much performance and storage out of the disks as possible. For serious use you should always use zfs with two or three-way mirrors. If the disks have different sizes you can make partitions, then add the partitions instead of the whole disks to zfs. zfs software raid is very popular but really the poor mans choice, and will not give you any benefit over hardware raid, so always use mirrors !! My current setup is ZOL with 4 ssds in stripe and 2 hhds in mirror. Yep if one of those ssds dies I'll lose all my data, but this gives me GB r/w speeds and over a TB of total storage for very cheap.