A vdev is a “virtual device”. By Virtual Device, it really means a single device/partition or composite of multiple devices/partitions, that act as a source for storage on which a pool can be created.

A multi-device or multi-partition vdev can be in one of the following shapes:

• Stripe (technically, each chunk of a stripe is its own vdev)
• Mirror
• RaidZ
• A dynamic stripe of multiple mirror and/or RaidZ child vdevs

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