Webinar Overview
As storage hardware becomes more expensive and harder to replace, many organizations are looking for ways to get more usable capacity out of the drives they already own. Traditional RAID-Z layouts are designed around matched drive sizes, which can leave additional capacity unused when mixed-size disks are combined into a pool.
AnyRAID enables using mixed-size drives together efficiently, helping organizations reclaim stranded capacity, expand storage incrementally, and spread out costly hardware replacement cycles. In some configurations, usable capacity can increase by more than 50% compared to traditional RAID-Z layouts.
Join Allan Jude and Jon Panozzo, CEO and Co-Founder of HexOS, for a technical discussion on how AnyRAID works, where it delivers the biggest gains, and the tradeoffs administrators should understand before deploying it in production.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why traditional RAID-Z struggles with mixed-size drives
- How AnyRAID unlocks more usable storage
- The future flexibility AnyRAID enables
- How to choose the tradeoffs between flexibility, redundancy, and performance
- Mixed-drive deployment strategies and use cases
If you're responsible for database performance on ZFS, this will give you a clearer, safer way to optimize it.
Top Questions from the Session—Answered!
🗨️ How is the tile map stored and managed?
To keep the tile map small and readily available, AnyRAID stores it in a reserved 64 MB area at the beginning of every drive, outside the standard ZFS data area. The tile map is loaded into memory, replicated across every drive, and stored in multiple copies for redundancy. In a seven-drive pool, for example, there are 28 copies of the tile map.
🗨️ Can AnyRAID recover from a failed drive without immediately replacing it?
Yes. If there is enough free space in the pool, AnyRAID can contract after an unexpected drive failure, redistributing data across the remaining drives and returning the pool to a protected state without immediately replacing the failed disk. If a replacement drive is only a few days away, waiting and replacing it is the better option. For longer delays, contraction provides a way to restore redundancy until a replacement can be added through expansion.
🗨️ Can existing RAID-Z pools be converted to AnyRAID?
Currently, there is no direct migration path from standard RAID-Z to AnyRAID because AnyRAID stores its tile map outside the standard data area. However, the work behind RAID-Z expansion, rebalance, and contraction can provide a conversion path in the future. Given the growing demand from existing RAID-Z users, there is a strong interest in supporting this capability in the future.
Date: June 25, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM EDT
Duration: 50 minutes.
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Meet the Panellists
Co-founder and Head of Solutions Architecture at Klara Inc., Allan Jude has been on the team since the beginning. Shepherding an amazing team of developers and sysadmins, he is the technical heart of our team. A core ZFS developer, FreeBSD contributor, and co-author of FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS, Allan is a community go-to person for ZFS and open source through and through. He enjoys spending his time improving ZFS, advancing FreeBSD, and making open source code better.
Learn about Klara
Co-Founder and CEO of HexOS, Jon Panozzo is a technology entrepreneur and self-hosting enthusiast focused on making advanced storage and server technologies easier to deploy and manage. His work centers on simplifying home server infrastructure through automation and flexible storage design.
Jon is a strong advocate for practical, user-friendly infrastructure and frequently speaks on self-hosting, storage architecture, and modern homelab environments.
Learn about HexOSFAQ
Open source storage supports European data sovereignty by giving organizations full control over their infrastructure, data location, and security policies without vendor lock-in. Transparent, auditable code allows EU organizations to verify how data is handled and maintain compliance with European regulations.
Klara helps enterprises design and deploy ZFS-based storage architectures that ensure operational independence, security, and long-term control.
Vendor lock-in restricts data portability, limits transparency, and can expose organizations to foreign jurisdiction risks. When storage platforms control architecture decisions, organizations lose flexibility over where and how data is stored.
Open source storage removes these constraints by enabling infrastructure portability and independent governance. Our team helps organizations build sovereign-ready storage platforms based on open technologies.
ZFS supports compliance and security with end-to-end data integrity checks, native encryption, controlled snapshots/replication, and predictable operational behavior in production. When correctly designed, it improves resilience and auditability for regulated workloads.