BSDNow Episode 42: Devious Methods

And RAID-Z is just as dead easy to set up as a mirror. I set up a number of 6-drive RAID-Z2's, which gives the same double redundancy as a three-way mirror, but is much more space-efficient (4 times the storage space as a 3-drive 3-way mirror with only twice the total number of drives). What blew me away was that setting up the array was essentially instantaneous.

The next delight I had was when it dawned on me that I could extemporaneously "zfs create" separate "sub" file systems within each of those storage pools; again, essentially an instantaneous operation, and the disk space apportioning is automatic and dynamic. You don't have to set size limits for those "sub" file systems.

After that I just kept discovering new wonders. The use of snapshots for live archiving without consuming much storage space is a warm glow.