You made me pee my pants — thank you! ;-)

However, there are two problems with that interpretation:

• - There still is the matter of the real murderer walking free because this bloke commits perjury.
• - I’m pretty sure my version makes for a better movie :-)

It seems to me this is happening in older times (though not before the invention of firearms, for obvious reasons), when being fedifragous carried a very heavy social price, especially for a woman and especially for a known one. Not that this stopped people from doing it, but everything was kept from the public eye.

The way I see it the woman in this story is a known person (high society and all that), who for any of a variety of reasons common in those awful times is locked into a marriage with our poor inmate’s best friend.

Woman and Protagonist have an affair, fall in love. So-called best friend finds out, steals Protagonist’s gun, performs some sort of heinous crime and dumps the gun at the place. Protagonist is visited by the friendly cops who take him away in cuffs, but because he’s madly in love with Woman he doesn’t offer his alibi, as doing so would expose her to widespread ridicule and shame, and he considers her honor more important than 10 years of his life. (Weird priorities, and all that.)

Perhaps he’s also afraid that making the whole thing public could pressure the Best Friend into getting violent with her — though the fact that he’s leaving her with a violent, disgruntled husband for a decade is no less worrying.

During his time in the slammer the woman sends him love letters (hopefully without Best Friend ever catching her) and continues her loveless marriage; when Protagonist is eventually freed he’ll grab her and they’ll run away, or so they at least hope.

Come to think of it, Protagonist might even want to enact some form of revenge over Best Friend — a framing and ten years behind bars tend to build up resentment.

This may seem a waste of space, but actually has several advantages:

- The larger the number of disks in a single array, and the larger the disks, the more realistic the chance becomes that a second disk will fail while you are rebuilding the array after replacing a disk. For this reason, many people move to RAID6 or even more parity with big disk/big array combinations.
– You are not limited to the size of your existing disks, and you have more granularity while upgrading. So while on a ‘normal’ raid system, you’d have to grow your 5x 2TB array by adding more 2TB disks, or replacing all 5 disks with bigger ones, you can instead use whatever size and number of disks is preferable at the moment. This way, you are very flexible in the construction of your arrays.

For example, in my main fileserver, I started with a 4x 1.5TB array. I recently had a lot of spare older disks (mostly 250GB). I added a second set of 4x 250GB. Since those are older disks, I expect them to fail at some point, and then I can either replace them with other disks I have lying around, or grow the array with newer bigger disks. Should I need more space, I can upgrade or grow with four disks at a time, instead of having to grow all disks at once. Since disks keep getting bigger and cheaper, buying only what you need now is generally a better investment.

I hope this helps.

But JBOD will of course offer no redundancy whatsoever, and data recovery from checksum (scrubbing) will not be available.

You could simulate some redundancy by specifying “copies=2″ in the zfs filesystem, but this won’t be as reliable, and still not support scrubbing

So using a 1TB raidz for now, and growing it in the future by replacing the 500GB disks with 2TB ones would be a better long-term strategy. Remember that it is not possible to increase the number of disks in a vdev, so once you have 3 vdevs of 1 disk, you can’t replace them with other vdevs that have redundancy. You can only add new vdevs to the pool.