Local replication vs mirror

[amars1983]

I've been running freenas for the last month and have been loving it. I'm currently running with one 5tb drive and will soon be adding another. My priority is data redundancy, so my question is, when adding the second disk, are there benefits to running it as a separate drive and running local rsync for replication versus just adding it as a mirror to the first?

I'm running with using non ecc ram and I understand the risks involved with that, so in the event that corruption happened, would running replication with local rsync vs the zfs mirror be better protection against corruption?

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

With local ZFS replication or an rsync task, you would control when replication occurred, which you might have some reason to prefer.

With a mirror, everything would be automatic, including repairing errors caused by bit rot, either when reading data or during a scheduled scrub.

I would expect the consensus to be with a mirror.