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I believe ZFS works best when having direct access to the disks, so having a md underlying it is not best practice. Not sure how well ZFS handles external disks, but that is something to consider. As for the drive sizes and redundancy, each type should have its own vdev. So you should be looking at a vdev of the 2x6TB in mirror and a vdev of the 2x12TB in mirror for maximum redundancy against drive failure, totaling 18TB usable in your pool. Later on if you need to add more space you can create new vdevs and add them to the pool.
If you're not worried about redundancy, then you could bypass ZFS and just setup a RAID-0 through mdadm or add the disks to a LVM VG to use all the capacity, but remember that you might lose the whole volume if a disk dies. Keep in mind that this would include accidentally unplugging an external disk.
ZFS is fine with external disks and indirect access to hardware in my limited experience. Performance would not be as optimal as it could be but data integrity shouldn't be a problem. If I didn't need the space and this was my primary storage array, I'd probably opt for the increased reliability of 2 mirror vdevs. I've done something similar to what OP is suggesting with LVM combining multiple disks on my off-site backup though. I combined 1T+3T+4T disks into a single 8TB volume. Deliciously bastardized, not a single integrity issue, no hardware failures either over the several years it ran.
Cool. Yeah, as a professional I am constantly aware of data integrity and have most of my shit stored on redundant drives. I had a WoW Guild Officer who shared his home setup with like 8x12TB drives in Windows Storage Spaces with no redundancy that was like 80% full. I had to ask how he slept at night knowing he could lose 80TB of data at any time.
Personally my TrueNAS has 5x1.92TB SSDs setup in two mirror vdevs and a hot spare for my ISCSI LUNs and 8x1.2TB 10K drives in a raidz2 (2 disk parity) for my NAS storage.
Yeah definitely wanting the redundancy, most of what I will be storing will not be life changing if lost just a big inconvenience, and for the life changing stuff I plan on having it backed up to cloud storage.