I am planning on upgrading my array to replace two 12yr old 3TB drives. Since the drives extended smart health still looks good, I want to make the 3TB drives a backup location for some data. Only plan to run the backup a few times a year. I want to treat this backup pool like cold storage almost. Also I might need all 6TB, so I dont want to do a mirrored pool. I'm fine with no redundancy here. Dont want to manually use unbalance here to make it work across two drives, so I prefer a combined 6TB pool. Would be great if I can do some kind of jbod or raid 0 unassigned devices grp, but can I even do that? I am assuming I need to use Pools instead. So I am asking what is the best I option I can do that meets these characteristics:

-6TB pool (can be jbod, raid0, zfs raid0, brtfs?)

-disks can be spun down

-if pool disk has issues, wont prevent array from starting up

Would be cool if I can use zfs raid0, but does it have issues with disks being spun down?

Appreciate any feedback. Thanks.

Edited November 29, 2025Nov 29 by kakashisensei

4 minutes ago, kakashisensei said:

but does it have issues with disks being spun down?

It will still spin down if the pool is not being used.