In my case even mixing up the disks might not help but I agree it’s still helpful.
I bought 4x Seagate Ironwolf Pro 12TB drives from different vendors, one failed after a year, then when I got the replacement another drive failed during the rebuild, and then 6 months later the replacement failed. Now another one of the original drives is also reporting reallocated sectors.
Same system has 4x WD Red drives which have been running fine with 0 reallocated sectors for almost 7 years.
> I chose raidz1. With only a handful of disks, the odds of two drives failing simultaneously is fairly low.
Which is not really the case of you bought x amount of the same disks and always use them together. I had that happen to me just a few months ago. 4 identical discs bought at the same time. Raidz1 reported one dead/dying disk so I replaced it and started resilvering, which can take days and leaves the disks at 100% utilization.
So after 12 hours or so a second one failed and the data was gone.
Lesson learned: mix up your disks