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Re:An Introduction to ZFS by Lex-2008 on Friday November 20, 2020 @03:42PM (#25164720)
> - zfs's logical volume layer is rather more flexible than btrfs's - you can make a multi-device set of mixed disks

Can you please elaborate on this? Working on mixed disks was always a killer feature of btrfs for me!

Re:An Introduction to ZFS by minimaul on Saturday November 21, 2020 @01:15PM (#25171491)
I do a pool called backup with two raidz vdevs - 7x3T in one raidz vdev, and 9x4T in one raidz vdev. Data is striped on each of the two raidz and I lose one 3T and one 4T's worth of capacity. This allows me to lose any one drive at a given time without data loss, and up to two drives (as long as they come out of separate vdevs).

As far as I could work out from the btrfs documentation, this isn't currently possible? Plus, RAID5/6 in btrfs is still of questionable stability?

Re:An Introduction to ZFS by Lex-2008 on Saturday November 21, 2020 @07:23PM (#25173779)
Thanks for clarification!

Indeed, btrfs doesn't allow such configuration. However, it allows using disks of unequal sizes within single filesystem - like, 3+3+4T in RAID1 mode gives you 5T of usable space (imagine 4T disk being split in half, and each half duplicated to a different 3T disk; remaining space of 3T disks duplicated to each other). But as I understand, it's possible to achieve the same with manual partitioning and vdev allocation on ZFS, too.

RAID5/6 is indeed a danger zone - in another thread I've already mentioned a nice write-up of "guidelines for users running btrfs raid5 arrays to survive single-disk failures without losing all the data" by Zygo Blaxell: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-btrfs/20200627032414.GX10769@h...