This is a great discussion on ZFS. I thoroughly enjoy reading HN! For those who aren't real IT people here is how I set up my first ZFS system at home. My back

This is a great discussion on ZFS. I thoroughly enjoy reading HN! For those who aren't real IT people here is how I set up my first ZFS system at home. My background includes a few years at IBM as an OS architect in charge of, among other things, the file systems and network services for AIX. However, this was a long time ago (~1988). So I understood NFS, inodes, what it meant to mount a device and the classic Unix commands for managing filesystems. The first ZFS problem for me was just the vocabulary. What's a pool? What's a VDev? Fortunately, there are lots of high-level descriptions of ZFS on the internet that cover the high level concepts. Getting the hardware set up was the second hurdle. There are a lot of discussions on forums that cover hardware issues and there you will find answers to many hardware issues, like: is ECC memory required, how fast does the processor need to be, are SATA drives recommended and what drive controllers are compatible with ZFS. Naturally, the answers to these questions depend on how critical is the system you are putting together. I suggest for most people to try setting up a ZFS on some old hardware just to get practice with it. I had a low end Dell tower server model that I wasn't using so it became my first FreeBSD/ZFS server. It had four hard drives. The real difficulty for me was just the lack of a deep understanding of how ZFS works. ZFS has lots of features totally new to me so working with only the man pages for the ZFS related commands was not giving me much fun. I ended up buying two small books that I can't recommend enough, FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS and FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS by Michael W Lucas and Allan Jude, see [1] and [2]. These books are each around 200 pages long. The chapters of the first book are: 1. Introducing ZFS 2. Virtual Devices 3. Pools 4. ZFS Datasets 5. Repairs and Renovations 6. Disk Space Management 7. Snapshots and Clones 8. Installing ZFS Each of the chapters is quite detailed, and I found these two books were just what I needed. [1] https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00Y32OHNM&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_Z60Q58E3RVN4V0C2JA3P https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00Y32OHNM&preview=new... [2] https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B01E40YIRM&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_p_kb_dp&reshareId=1GAQXKANM9Z3N2K8MQXE&reshareChannel=system https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B01E40YIRM&preview=new...