This post contains some examples and short descriptions of different ZFS pool layouts. I’m assuming you’re already familiar with the features of ZFS. If not, you may want to check out the Wikipedia article on ZFS.

General information

It’s recommended to never have more than 9 drives in a single vdev, as this will have a noticeable performance impact, especially when resilvering. Resilvering may become so slow that it’s likely you’ll lose additional drives while the process is running, potentially causing data loss. It’s therefore recommended to use multiple vdevs in the same pool when you want to use more than 9 drives.

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