RAID 0 VDevs in a RAIDz2?

[uncleungie]

Quick Y/N question.

If I have four 4TB drives, and four 2TB drives, is it possible to stripe the 2TB drives to create two 4TB volumes, and then use the resulting six 4TB volumes in a RAIDz2 (total 16GB of storage)?

I've poked around, and can't find an answer. Sorry if this has been obviously discussed.

 

[jgreco]

No. Thankfully FreeNAS does not allow this sort of layering, which some other packages have, and which always seem to introduce ... problems. ZFS was wise to forbid nesting of vdevs.

However, it is easy to see why that might be an attractive option given your existing hardware.

 

[uncleungie]

Thank you. Looks like I'll have to figure out a more creative way to use all my storage.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, your realistic options are a little limited. Each set of four can be in RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2, so that's an 8TB RAIDZ2 or a 12TB RAIDZ1 for the 4TB's, and half those numbers for the 2TB's, so that works out to a total of 12TB of RAIDZ2 or 16TB in RAIDZ1. On the upside, if you do two RAIDZ2 vdev's, you can lose up to half your drives while still having your data