I'd argue the main advantage that ZFS gives is one that this article tries to dismiss - the article seems to assume that a lot of ZFS deployments are not multi-

I'd argue the main advantage that ZFS gives is one that this article tries to dismiss - the article seems to assume that a lot of ZFS deployments are not multi-disk, or not RAIDZ? I can say that at both work and home, I have only ever seen groups of mirrors or RAIDZ in use - I've never seen just striped pools or single disk ZFS. I know it's anecdotal, but I have seen ZFS recover data flawlessly with drives returning incorrect data for some sectors with no I/O errors, or from total and sudden drive failure with no SMART warning. I personally think drive hardware is rather more fallible than this article assumes. With that said, of course ZFS is not a magic bullet, and there's no substitute for backups - but ZFS does make that easier too, because snapshotting is trivial, and zfs send | zfs receive is very useful for transferring the snapshots to another pool for backup. And it does require an amount of reading and understanding before you set it up.