In the end, you'll pick some setup and find out whether you're happy with it or not over the course of a few months or years. Next time around, you'll set it up the same way but slightly improved, or you'll do something else entirely to see if it makes you happier. Just keep the most important data backed up on a separate machine/external drive, and you'll be fine.
The FreeBSD community enjoys finding the last half of a percent in performance increase or discerning reliability in the case of concurrent meteorite impacts and zombie apocalypse for workloads comparable to Amazon.com. As a private user, just have fun trying stuff out, keep decent backups and don't worry too much about the details
I've found that zfs enlightenment comes first from understanding what it actually does (which is very complicated), and then carefully trying to optimize it for fun or profit (which is very, very complicated).
Oh, and: using partitions instead of drives gives you the chance of using GPT labels to identify your drives. Instead of having a pool made from
The FreeBSD community enjoys finding the last half of a percent in performance increase or discerning reliability in the case of concurrent meteorite impacts and zombie apocalypse for workloads comparable to Amazon.com. As a private user, just have fun trying stuff out, keep decent backups and don't worry too much about the details
I've found that zfs enlightenment comes first from understanding what it actually does (which is very complicated), and then carefully trying to optimize it for fun or profit (which is very, very complicated).
Oh, and: using partitions instead of drives gives you the chance of using GPT labels to identify your drives. Instead of having a pool made from
ada0
, ada1
and ada2
, it could be /dev/gpt/topbay
, /dev/gpt/midbay
and /dev/gpt/lowerbay-replacement
. This also protects you against fallout from the shifting of drive numbering (i.e. ada2
becomes ada3
for some reason).