> On Nov 6, 2013, at 11:43 AM, tclug at freakzilla.com wrote:
> 
> I have 8 disks in there. What I assumed RAID5 would do with that was 6+2, which is fine by me. If ZFS can give me the same result as a RAID5 array can (as in, a continuous 18TB filesystem with 6TB for parity, or whatever) I'm totally fine with that. I will have to read up on ZFS, which I should've done ages ago anyway.

18T is no problem for ZFS. It sounds like you have 3T disks in RAID5 + a hot spare. With such large disks, that's a really bad idea because you have very high odds of hitting an error while trying to rebuild your array.  Here's one semi-technical explanation :  
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162

RAID6 or, better, raidz2 would be a good idea -- even better than RAID10 for data security:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2151343

ZFS' scrubbing, checksums, snapshots, etc. have won me over. 


Thomas