Sure, you can build striped raidz and 3+ way mirrors and other more exotic variants but the two most typical corners of the configuration space are plain raidz2+ for all the drives vs striped mirrors. You lose usable space not putting all your drives into a single parity array and maximizing usable space is usually why you go with parity. Mixing multiple arrays only makes sense from this perspective if you have a mix of drive sizes.
> You lose usable space not putting all your drives into a single parity array
Well if you're aiming for a specific ratio but want greater capacity without upgrading all disks to larger capacities, your only option is to use more vdevs configured just the same.
Example: 66% usable capacity, 6 disks in a raidz2 (4 usable + 2 parity) or 9 disks in a raidz3 (6 usable + 3 parity). If you want to add capacity but maintain your parity ratio (for a given fault tolerance risk) there is no raidzN with N > 3, so you must add vdev.
Increasing the size of the raidz vdev means you're reducing your failure tolerance.
