I do the same and use an HP ProLiant microserver (it was dirt cheap). ZFSOnLinux just worked out of the box and has kept working ever since.

Word to the wise: Read about the block size of your disks, mine are newer and needed a block size different than the default but I didn't know about it, and now they are slower than they could be. I don't remember details, but you will definitely find it in a cursory search.

Newer disks use 4K instead of 512 byte sectors like older drives, so when you partition your disks you need to take care to align them accordingly.

Exactly. ZFS has a parameter for this, which you need to set manually.

Same as StavrosK -- HP Micro Server. The 16TB box is an N40L. I bought it awhile ago, but haven't needed extra storage until recently.

I also have an N36L running FreeNAS/ZFS on 4x2TB disks which I've used for about 1.5 years. It finally filled up (SO has data intensive profession) so I was forced to pony up. It's still being used every day and has no signs of failing.

They're both great home servers. I sometimes wish they had more CPU, but for the money, HP is basically giving them away.

As a side-side note, the HP Microservers (N54L[]) are currently under cashback promotion afaik in UK ('til end of sep) and Italy ('til end of oct). In Italy it's typically 199€, with a 40€ cashback (so 159€), in UK i think it's 190£ with 90£ cashbash so around 100£ final. I don't know if there's something similar in other countries.

[] there are 3 HP microserver versions afaik, the old N40L, the N54L and the new just released Gen8 that is way more expensive (500$ vs 200$)

As another point of reference, I have a ProLiant Microserver running FreeBSD with 4x3TB drives in RAID-Z. I installed a custom BIOS that removes the limitations on the optical SATA port and run a small single drive for the OS off that.

It's a dream to use and gives me 8TB of usable storage. I can easily hit saturation of the NIC and it's nice and small and quiet, fitting in the bottom corner of my bookshelf.