As far as any of your reliability concerns, my experience with ZFS has been that it is amazingly reliable. If I had to pick one place to put precious data that

As far as any of your reliability concerns, my experience with ZFS has been that it is amazingly reliable. If I had to pick one place to put precious data that I needed to access for 10-20 years, ZFS would be it. Of course, I wouldn't put it in one place, so if I picked places to put that data, ZFS would definitely be one of them. I've been using ZFS for over a decade, both for my personal storage systems and for work (largely backup servers), and despite heavy use and abuse, I've never once had data loss while using it. I've had some white-knuckle times, but in the end ZFS was able to recover all the data. I say "abuse" because I was able to write a stress test program based on my usage that uncovered several ZFS+FUSE issues early in that port. Just a data point.