After much hemming and hawing, I’ve finally put together an order to expand my storage array. I’d been getting uncomfortably close to filling it recently, mostly due to transcoding content for our new AppleTV, but 2.7 TB of usable space can’t hold a geek for long. So, I broke out the card, spent a large chunk of my remaining technology fund, and ordered 5 more hard drives.

When all is said and done, I’ll have 10 hard drives in the system – a mirrored boot array, and four pairs of large SATA disks in a single zpool. I’m sacrificing some of the size options I would have had by moving from a RAIDZ setup to mirrored pairs. This provides for more reliability, better recoverability, and a higher number of IOPS. Even with the tradeoff, I’ll still be doubling the space in the array, and it will be easier in future to upgrade everything.