For the past 7 years I run Ubuntu + ZFS with a Xeon E3 + ECC RAM + SuperMicro MoBo inside a NORCO 20-bay 4U chassis. This was a great setup for years since I ne

For the past 7 years I run Ubuntu + ZFS with a Xeon E3 + ECC RAM + SuperMicro MoBo inside a NORCO 20-bay 4U chassis. This was a great setup for years since I needed 40TB+ and at the time of build 2TB drives were the best price per gb. Now, I’m moving back from a house to an apartment, so I need something much more compact and quiet and went with a TrueNAS Mini XL, since it’s one of the few tower-like form factors with enough hot-swap bays for me. It runs nice and quiet, and comes with 10GigE. TrueNAS (the OS) has been a pleasure to use too, but it’s obviously a bit more limited than a full Linux install. I now have it loaded with 10TB drives. ZFS is the hero here. I tried many solutions in the past (mdadm on ext, btrfs, XFS, hardware RAID) and got burned by rotten bits and confusing UX leading to user error data loss. But in the past 7 years running ZFS I haven’t lost a single bit, and been continuously impressed with the incredibly easy to use CLI and “intelligence” of the file system itself. Snapshots, send/receive, datasets, everything is just so well refined. It felt ahead of its time a decade ago, and still does today. Moving the file system from Linux to the FreeBSB based TrueNAS was effortless.