I've been using an HP MicroServer (the N54L to be exact) + FreeNAS with great success. My outlay was <$300 since I used disks I already had lying around and the performance is much better than the cheap home-grade NAS products.

I think it's indisputable that ZFS stops "bit rot". It's an excellent tool for that.

However, as a casual observer and long time ZFS wanna-be, I've noticed that the following two issues haven't really gone away:

1) Which version of ZFS? After Sun was assimilated by the Borg and after the great ZFS developer diaspora, everyone seems to have their fingers in the ZFS development pie. There are a plethora of derivative versions. Nothing wrong with that, but when there was a single canonical version there were "many eyes" on it. Bugs were hunted down and squashed. But now? Every "port" to a different OS variant introduces new opportunities for bugs, doesn't it? Is ZFS on FreeBSD as stable as on Solaris? And FreeNAS isn't pure FreeBSD, have they tweaked ZFS?

2) When ZFS is working, it's great. But it doesn't seem to simply fray around the edges. When it fails, it fails catastrophically. I've seen much advice on mailing lists to "restore from backup" after something goes wrong.

Well in the case of what I am buying I am using the ZFS version that comes with FreeNAS which is based on FreeBSD. Everything can fail at some point. So I also have off site backup. I will have 4x4TB in this setup and only need 4GB of space so I think I will do the ZFS version of RAID10.

In retrospect, my post, while making valid points, was a bit of a Negative Nancy whine.

I'm glad you pointed out this low-cost ZFS appliance for home and SOHO use. It's not like when Sun sold ZFS boxes with 45 disks. Instead it's low cost, directly competitive with Synology and HP MicroServer boxes.

As Marta Stewart would say: "It's a good thing".

Note that ZFS can detect the bit rot, but you'll need to actually run some kind of RAID (in this case RAID-Z) to have it fixed automatically. And if you do want bit rot detected on a timely basis, you'll need to have the data on the drives scrubbed on a regular basis (weekly? monthly?, not sure what is sufficient).

You can set the "copies" property to 2 or 3 even with a single disk, so if one dodgy sector blats one of your files, ZFS can still recover: https://blogs.oracle.com/relling/entry/zfs_copies_and_data_p...

I didn't know that. Thanks.