Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only time I've lost data with zfs was when i was first doing something supremely stupid, mostly as a dare to see if it would work. I had recently upgraded my pool and had a bunch of old disks lying around so i fired them up in a new pool, 6x 4TB and 6x 8TB disks. I took the 4TB disks and set them in in a raid0 to get effectively 9x 8TB disks. Apparently doing this will work but you MUST make sure you properly wipe al…
Is there a zfs native way to create raid0 disks now? On Linux I usually set up a linear mapping with dmsetup, and then point zfs to that. But this hides the native disks from zfs. I've done that a couple times to make a bunch of mismatched disk fit into zfs's requirement that all are of the same size. The ability to work with a mix of disk sizes is one advantage of btrfs - if you remember to be extra careful on a dis…
My personal preference in this kind of situation is to still just use lvm2 to jbod the disks together if I;m fine with the risks of losing it all anyway, and just setup a good backup strategy. More because I'm familiar with it and all the tools than other setups. I think zfs might give me more early warning signs of a disk with an issue but the performance hit isn't always worth it to me there. I've got an 8tb raid0 nvme ssd array (4x2tb) setup to give me some blazing fast local storage for a few key VMs thst I just backup daily to the zfs storage. I can get 7.5GB/s reads and 6.7GB/s writes to that array doing that and using an lvm-thin pool so I can nicely snapshot during backups.