A little overloaded in pool/vdev setup articles and would like a quick sanity check

I have 10 SAS 10Tb disks sitting on my HBA controller. These are enterprise HGST drives that I pulled from a device at work. I’m not sure it seems wise to jam them all into one vdev from everything I’ve read. I have no serious performance needs, just the storage space. So my thought was to create two vdevs that are raidz2 each. This gives me about 54T. This is in contrast to just a single vdev that would get me about 71T storage but puts more risk into the system because now the vdev is so wide. Then again a single vdev of raidz3 would get me 62T and buy me quite a bit of resiliency.

My eyes ache from reading all the articles that are linked out of this and the archived forum. I think the two-vdev seems the right approach. Does anyone agree/disagree?

10-wide raidz2 is wide, but not excessively so. If you keep on eye on drive health and can replace at the first failure, it should be perfectly fine.
10-wide raidz3 if you’re paranoid.
A stripe of 5-wide raidz2 gets you more IOPS, so more performance—which is reportedly not your requirement.

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Hey thanks a ton! I oped to roll raidz3 and I think it will work just fine for me. :slight_smile:

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