SnapRAID has its drawbacks, sure. As with any technology, deciding to use one solution over another is a balancing act of choosing the set of drawbacks that are

SnapRAID has its drawbacks, sure. As with any technology, deciding to use one solution over another is a balancing act of choosing the set of drawbacks that are acceptable for a particular use case. In this case, _for my simple needs_ of running a home NAS, the fact SnapRAID doesn't run in real-time is not an issue. In fact, I prefer being in control of when it runs, and what it's doing exactly. Having a short time window where some new data is not replicated is a negligible drawback to me. OTOH, while ZFS solves this particular issue, its drawbacks of being difficult to scale, and a huge black box that claims to "just work", when in fact my _entire_ array relies on it working perfectly, 100% of the time, are a tough pill to swallow. I'm sure that with the years of dedicated improvements and stability fixes, it's a battle-tested system where the likelihood of it failing is close to 0, even on Linux. But the fact that it's theoretically possible is a deal-breaker to me. In this sense, I much prefer SnapRAID's approach that makes this literally impossible. SnapRAID could stop working entirely or disappear tomorrow, and all my data is perfectly safe. So, yes, SnapRAID + ext4 is radically simpler than ZFS, IMO. Would I recommend this setup in a corporate environment, where company resources are on the line? Probably not. But I would still advocate against ZFS and mdadm, and probably suggest something like Ceph instead.