Traditionally mirrored disk sets in Linux and other operating systems have been limited to two devices. While mirroring has the benefit over other raid levels in that each mirrored device contains a complete copy of the data, the two device limit became inadequate as disk sizes ballooned. In the age of multi-TB drives, simply rebuilding a degraded mirrored array could actually cause the surviving device to fail, eliminating the very redundancy one was expecting.

ZFS addresses this particular problem in several ways through data checksums, self-healing and smart resilvering instead of blindly rebuilding full array members even if only 1% of disk space is being used. [Continue reading...] 3-way Disk Mirrors With ZFSOnLinux