[flexd]

I make my pools with the serial number /dev/disk/by-id/ names, like ata-WDC_WD30EFRX-68EUZN0_WD-XXXXXXXXXXX.

That is not going to change between different machines as far as I know, I might be wrong about this. I made some bad choices (in hindsight) when making this pool for my uses, but it's still going strong many years later. [1]

This current pool (which is now old, 50k+ power on hours on these disk) has survived a motherboard dying randomly and one or two SSD failures with the OS on.

Always just installed a OS on a new SSD and it's been picked up just fine.

[1] I went with RAID-Z2 for 6x3TB WD Reds where I probably should have made mirrored pools or something like it to gain more space? It's been a while since I looked at it. Can't really expand this pool or add more storage without replacing each disk one by one with something bigger.

I could make another pool with new disks but I'd lose another 20% to parity.

[flyinghamster]

I use those names as well, at least now that I entirely use ZoL. That wasn't an option back in the day with OpenSolaris and Illumos. You'd be using names like c0t0d0 instead, and woe to you if it found the wrong disks in the wrong places (it would just refuse to import claiming the pool was faulted).

Caveat: things may have changed since then - it was at least six years ago.

[flexd]

I have only used ZoL myself, on Debian and Ubuntu. I really sorta need to buy new disks for this, but they are so expensive right now. I should probably just backup all the stuff I really care about and offload most of this to some sort of cloud storage/rented space somewhere. I don't know that these drives will fail (WD Red 3TB), but the 50k+ power on hours are starting to worry me a bit.

They have not seen a huge amount of reads/writes though, if we don't count the weekly scrub and weekly usage by just me.