disks

This required a lot of disk seeks on spinning disks and unfortunately file flushing could not be disabled..

Unless you're talking about SSD cache disks, in which case that's something you have to explicitly set up.

Further, for reliability, several copies on different disks with regular integrity checks to detect and mitigate issues that build up over time.

This, of course, assumes your data is laid out in a sane fashion and you're not blindly jumping all over the disks.

It'd be amusing to see people fill their disks at a far faster rate than they expect their network connection to allow.

Since data integrity is verified by checksums rather than by reading the data back from all disks and comparing it, the disks within a ZFS mirror are able to serve read requests in parallel.

My conjecture on Nearline is that it's unused disk space on disks that are mostly I/O bound.

So, they instead implemented storage as objects that were written to disks.

I remember those $5 shareware disks you used to be able to get at the markets.

I tend to be a little paranoid about backups, so I have a few different disks backing up my main, desktop, machine.

Spinning disks cost next to nothing and are good enough.

So if you want to test how big a pool would be with three 1TB disks without actually using 3TB of allocated space: 'truncate -s 1T file1.img'.