u/ComatoseCow

I have been able to get very lucky and scrape together a system that is quite solid. I have 64gb of ram. I have 8x12tb used enterprise drives, 2x1.92tb sata ssds, 2x256gb sata SSDs likely for os, and 2x1tb NVME drives.

What I would like to ask as I have only used zfs in a basic capacity, what would be the safest and most efficient way to layout the vdevs.

The large capacity will mostly be used for media files, photo backups, and file backups/backups in general.

The way I understand it my most useful options are listed below:

• One big raidz2 or 3, with or w/o a special vdev
• 2 raidz1 vdevs, with or w/o a special vdev
• 4 mirror, with or w/o a special vdev
• Everything in its own pool, a big raidz2 or 3 and mirrors for the respective ssds

Just looking for thoughts, I would like to prioritize safety and efficiency, the capacity loss is OK to a point, would like to reduce as much as possible.