I want to build a server using freebsd 9 and zfs. I have some old hardware (intel quad core with 8 gb ram) lying around, and I am willing to purchase two or three 1 TB disks. I also have a dlink RAID server with two 1 tb disks already in it that I would probably stop using, so those 2 hard disks would be available for use in the zfs server once I've moved the data on them (about 300 mb currently in raid 1) over to the new server.
So that gives me 2 or 3 disks at the start, with the ability to move to 4 or 5 disks once I've successfully setup the zfs server and copied the data over.
My question is how to best setup the zfs pool so that I have max redundancy and storage space, with the ability to move to 2 or 3 or larger drives in the future when they become available. So I don't care about speed that much, I'm guessing my ethernet (even at 1gb/s) will be the determining factor in the speed of the system anyways...?
My current thought is to buy 2 new disks, set it up using striping mode. Once I've copied over all the data from my dlink nas, I would remove 1 of those drives, add it to the pool by making it a mirror of one of the new drives. Once the array is rebuilt, I would then move the other drive over to the pool so that it mirrors the second new drive... after all that is done, I should have the rough equivalent of RAID 10, "striped mirrors".
Is that possible, or is there a better way of setting that up?
Again, my priority is max redundancy, maintenance (swapping out old drives with newer / larger drives and increasing my total pool space), available storage space, and speed; in that order.