Maximus

To recap my understanding of options when wanting to Expand a 2-Drives setup: Option 1: Expand to RAID10 Add 2 new drives as a second mirror pair (zvol) to your pool, creating RAID10. Option 2: Rebuild as RAIDZ Recreate the pool as RAIDZ1, RAIDZ2, or RAIDZ3. Note: RAIDZ1 can be done with only 3 drives, so you may only need to buy one additional drive. RAID10 RAIDZ Backup Required? No Yes Ease of Implementation Easy Complex (requires pool recreation) Usable Storage 50% of total capacity 67%+ (with RAIDZ1 on 3 drives) Redundancy High (tolerates 1 drive failure per mirror) Varies (1–3 drives depending on RAIDZ level) Performance Faster (striping + mirroring) Slower (parity calculations) Cost Requires 2 additional drives Can start with only 1 extra drive (RAIDZ1)

OLED monitors to get less eye strain and go harder!

Yes, same thing here.

I bought a used HP ProDesk 600 G3 with an i5-7500 (not the slim version) for a few bucks and added a pcie>nvme expansion card. I use an old sata ssd to boot and two 2TB nvme drives for storage, it works great 🙂