Re: DIF/DIX
"If you only have a single copy, it'll error out and tell you which file(s) are unavailable, prompting you to recover those files."
Even if you only have a single drive, the metadata is replicated in several places by default and you can tell ZFS to store multiple copies of the data too. That's available on _top_ of the RAID functionality for times when you're feeling utterly paranoid.