Running a Degraded raidZ2 ZPool full time

[Finalbrez]

I'm on a budget and only have 5 3TB Hard Drives lying around, but I want to at least get 12TB of storage. This is just going to be a test pool for now with some simple and already backed up things stored on it, but going forward if this does end up turning into a more heavily relied on storage pool, I'd like to have the upgrade path to add the second level of redundancy. My plan is create a dummy file to create a degraded 6 drive raidZ2 rather than a 5 drive raidZ1. That will run degraded for the foreseeable future, but I'm wondering if running a degraded raidZ2 will have any negative difference to a raidZ1.

 

[nojohnny101]

That will run degraded for the foreseeable future, but I'm wondering if running a degraded raidZ2 will have any negative difference to a raidZ1.

There are no negatives.

You might get minor speed slowdowns compared to a full functioning pool but that might/might not be noticeable or important depending on your usages and circumstances. Especially if you are just using this for testing purposes (great idea in test replacing a failed drives), you should be fine.

 

[rs225]

The biggest negative is that you might miss a warning about a real drive failure, because you ignore it, or you don't notice it going from degraded to degraded.