I don't at all disagree with the OpenSolaris/ZFS assessment, but the hardware is a bit on the heavy side. You really don't need that server motherboard (knock 100 dollars off the price). The CPU is also overkill, and ECC RAM isn't necessary though at that price it's not exactly a bad idea either.

The remaining cost is just HDs - you can knock one off the list if you use RAID-Z instead of RAID-Z2 and remember to replace a drive as soon as it goes bad.

OpenSolaris itself doesn't need a full 320GBs for the OS and its software: an 80GB hard drive will suffice and then some.

Of course the problem then is that Intel don't support ECC on anything but Xeons; AMD are rather better, all you need is a supporting motherboard (which includes some cheap and cheerful integrated ones), any AMD CPU in the past few years will do.

Now, if only Intel would get off their arses and release the W3xxx Xeons so I can build an ECC protected i7 system. 12GB without ECC is getting a bit ridiculous.

I'd also go for a pair of dynamically striped mirrors instead of RAID-Z2; modern disks can already pretty much saturate GigE individually, so I'd rather go for increased overall IOPS rather than increased sequential throughput at the cost of making every drive take part in each IO.

I've heard reports of ZFS doing things like putting more data on one vdev because the disks underlying it had 16MB of cache and those in the other vdev only had 8MB; bit fancier than what you normally associate with RAID10.

One of the reasons I used Xen is because OpenSolaris still lacks proper network drivers for just about all the network cards I own. It also had issues with my external usb drives, so it was just easier getting linux to handle the hardware interfaces to opensolaris.

I use it as timemachine backups for my macs & media storage... but on a cheap budget.

I've used ZFS + Solaris at home and with Sun hardware in several companies for 'appliance' servers that we deployed on-site in remote locations. We were able to achieve reliable storage on a 1U server without paying for a RAID card. It was great. ZFS is great for the budget. Now I want it at home.

But where's the simple appliance to do this? For a home fileserver I just want a small box large enough to hold 4 disks, and I want it to set me up a RAID-Z or mirrored ZFS when I pop them in, and serve them via all the common methods I pick via a simple web interface.

Why has nobody done this? I've looked, and the only ZFS 'storage appliances' are software packages.

At present I have a RAID-1 mirror on cheap external drives on a mac mini, and I KNOW the array will degrade within a couple years. Has always happened to me with software RAID. ZFS would be great, but there is no such appliance. (And yes, I tried the patch to make OS X write to ZFS... so slow it virtually locked the system).

Please, someone: build this. It will be a great product. You can offer much better storage reliability than can cheap RAID with ZFS.

Unfortunately ZFS depends on the Solaris fault management daemon (fmd) to handle failing disks by itself, something FreeBSD doesn't yet have a replacement for.

Thecus 7700 supports ZFS. 7 drive bays though.

I am looking for something like this instead of tape backups. I looked at some NAS devices that hold five drives and seem pretty robust. One of the devices can mirror itself to another NAS over the network so you can have two separate places to store your data and not have a hardware failure of one device kill the other.(one exception would be the case where the master device gets degraded to the point where bad data is being written to it and then propagates the changes to the other device. I don't know how likely this failure situation is though.)

I think the dual NAS idea is a good one; I'm considering it.

I do crave a higher bandwidth connection to disk.

I wish OS X would ship with ZFS. A mac mini + zfs + JBOD seems fascinating.

I had the new file permissions issue but hadn't had time to hunt down the solution.

Compared to the 4-bay $500 Drobo, (plus $200 for DroboShare) it's not bad considering he's getting exactly what he wants.

The trade off is that he has to maintain the Solaris box, and the size/footprint of the overall solution.

"""Theodore Ts'o, developer of ext3 and ext4 filesystems, said that Btrfs “has a number of the same design ideas that Reiser4 had” and that “the filesystem format has support for some advanced features that are designed to leapfrog ZFS.”""

I did try OpenSolaris first but it didn't like my old hardware.

http://tinyurl.com/p5szxs

It uses an arm based 1.2GHz CPU with 512MB memory, it is officially supported by Debian:

http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/qnap/ts-219/