I'm working on building a new pool with 4x 8TB drives in raidz1. As 2 of the drives are part of my current array, I need to be a bit creative in how I'll move the data over without having to buy any temporary drives.
I'm making some changes to my existing array, this will need to stay alive while I build my ZFS pool and transfer the data. It will consist of 5x 4TB drives, one of them will be used as parity. 2 of these 4TB drives is 5 years old, and running perfectly fine. 2 of them are 10 years old, and haven't been used in 18 months.
Am i crazy for using 10 year old drives? As long as I don't loose more than 1 drive during this whole process, I will be fine. I'll take some precautions, do preclear with verify, don't store anything precious on them, etc.