I've got an 11-disk system with raidz3. All the striped modes will (in effect) limit write rates to the bandwidth of a single disk, but ZFS is good about this:

I've got an 11-disk system with raidz3. All the striped modes will (in effect) limit write rates to the bandwidth of a single disk, but ZFS is good about this: So long as the writes are reasonably large, as they'll likely be for a media server, you'll usually get the maximum streaming bandwidth of the disk. So, 150-200 MB/s. Reads are much faster. It's not something you'd want to use in a DC, but for mostly-idle storage at home it's perfectly fine. Add in an SSD cache, and it'll be downright speedy. That gives an effective capacity of 64 TB, given 8TB disks, and the chance of four disks dying before you can replace even a single one is pretty low. The usual limitation of ZFS applies, however: You have to decide the number of disks up-front, as you can't expand the size of a RAIDZ vdev later on. (Well, you can, but only by replacing all the disks with larger versions.)