For end-users who are non-technical, I agree that JBOD + good fs (ext4 or other journaling system)+ good backup is the way to go. If there is a good appliance NAS out there, then some kind of RAID may make sense. The appliance taking care of monitoring the health of the disks and providing intellige...

Ayup. Anything critical, I make a local copy on another machine.

All good points. And, in my case, offsite backups are handled by Crashplan.

While I grudgingly allow my wife to run a Windows machine, I've managed to eradicate it elsewhere at home.

The linux camel-nose has been put under the tent flap at work...no chance of getting the rank-and-file off of Windows, but I'm hoping to eventually migrate most of the servers.

-Pete

No apologies needed! This is excellent and relevant commentary.

I hear you. This is more personal curiosity than really trying to master ZFS as a career skill.

There are some servers at work which may become "available" soon. If I can grab those, I'm going to throw OpenStack on there.

I'm certainly interested in your findings! Part of why I'm interested in using ZFS is simply to gain experience with it. I do IT/Ops stuff in my day job, and I'm always looking out to learn new things. I may also wind up doing some other things with the storage that would make some of the pool/snaps...

Thanks for the input guys!

I'll go digging though the reviews for a good mobo + CPU + case.

What I've read so far about ZFS and RAM requirements indicates about 1GB per TB of disk. I'm probably going to have 4-6TB of disk, so I'll probably put 8GB in the machine. Not going to use ZFS deduplication.

I'm currently using in a full sized Ubuntu box for storage with a 4x750GB drive RAID5. I'd like to set up a small, quiet, efficient box to serve those drives. FreeNAS looks like a very good solution for my needs, software-wise. I'm currently thinking of a pair of WD Red 3TB disks striped. The Intel ...

But I definatly AM going to look for some good reviews on their thermal performance of the ThermalRight SI-97A. The Arctic Cooling Copper Silent 2 TC looks real promising though! Has anyone heard of the nexus AXP 3200? Would be great if anyone has any input on it.. http://www.ncix.com/products/inde...

Ok, good to know, Telix. I went ahead and ordered the SLK900U with a Nexus. I'm going to give that a shot.

Ok, thanks for the tips and the welcome!

Badger: I'll have to look at the over/underclocking options on that mobo...I'm not sure I can adjust things that way.

I've got a mobo (Albatron KX800something) that does not work with the Zalman 7000/7700. The board is running a Athlon XP 2400+, and will be going in a Sonata case. Other suggestions for a not-breaking-the-bank quiet CPU cooler? Possibly something off of the SPCR Lab Clearance list?

Thanks!