I needed somewhere to plant files while I reconfigured my ZFS NAS from raidz1 to raidz2 and added an extra drive to compensate for the loss of space. Suprisingly I got away with it!
Mergerfs is quite useful. Now I have a lot of occasional spare storage and somewhere to put snapshots until I can save up for a proper backup drive.
I’ve tried Snapraid but we didn’t get on, I never got the hang of it and lost data as a result.
I think you can use different size disks with ZFS if you use raid10 for the pairs, but the cost would be to high for me. Did I read somewhere that they were working on a way to use different size disks? That would be useful.
Just to add, I’d like BTRFS to be brilliant, so much interesting potential, but I read its deemed safer to use raid10 rather that any variant of raid5. if you’re ever faced with having to rebuild the array, as others have mentioned. Single use is ok as far as I know.


It needs to be controlled to make a profit. Once something you love becomes popular the bulldozers will move in.