I've been using ZFS in an enterprise setting since around September 2007. We're primarily a Sparc-shop but starting to bring in more x86 Sun boxes. As we're migrating effectively to Solaris 10, we've made ample use of ZFS snapshots and cloning, as well as Solaris Zones. One of our more useful additions is using ZFS/Zones to create a code development environment: think CVS/Subversion but for entire servers. A home-grown solution that couldn't have been possible without ZFS and Solaris Zones.

Now with my home computers rapidly filling up with digital overload (photos, home videos, random downloads, etc.) the thought of setting up ZFS for the home environment seems compelling. Our various computers (Mac, Windows and Solaris) have even more various USB or Firewire external drives to act as backups or additional storage volumes. I also have an older Mac with some leftover smaller drives to provide basic file sharing and more archival storage. The primary desktop systems are backed up nightly and versioned at the file-level, so that each drive has at least a dedicated backup drive for itself in a different chassis or enclosure. Not the most robust setup yet, but probably more backup than the large majority of users have at home. I don't have decent off-site backups yet (but Amazon's S3-based services look pretty good). Our home disk usage is probably in the 850-900GB range not counting the backup drives. But since space is running low again (and the typical pruning of unneeded stuff is recovering less and less space) it's time to consider expansion options.

So why not use a generic consumer-grade Network Attached Storage (NAS) or RAID solution? After having seen the light with ZFS, an appliance, while convenient, seems too limited, in terms of features and flexibility. ZFS is a lot less picky about the underlying devices. Snapshots and the robustness of ZFS seem to be beyond what typical consumer appliances can or will offer. Partial ding against a home NAS is it's bottlenecked by the network. I don't have GigE running at home, just Fast Ethernet. Granted, a home server running ZFS and NFS/SMB sharing to the rest of the home LAN is going to be similarly bottlenecked. But if I'm going to be bottlenecked by the network speed, at least I can still have the benefit of ZFS. Besides, the server running ZFS may well be my primary system, in which case the data bottleneck is going to be Firewire 400 or 800.

The typical home RAID setups, pretty much just offer RAID 0, 1 or 5. Nothing wrong with RAID per se, but RAID 1+0 or Raidz would be nice. Also, those home-RAID devices typically use software RAID anyway, so again I might as well use ZFS, right?

I'm not especially interested in debating technical particulars of file systems and/or volume managers. I know there's plenty of options out there. I just happen to be interested in ZFS and how to apply it to home use in particular.

What I'm searching for is: Affordable "Reasonably" Redundant Storage for the Home using ZFS

• "Affordable" : for me, means <$1000 range for the whole kit (server/enclosure/drives/software, etc.). If you can spring for more than that, lucky you. My data is important, yes, but not more so than my bills :)
• "Reasonably" redundant: We're not talking about a backup stratagem per se, just reliable PRIMARY storage that can withstand drive and sector/byte-level failures. Would like a minimum of 4-5 drives, although up to 8 would be nice, to have room to grow.
• Home: Relatively low-noise and ideally low-power consumption. However, since we're talking ZFS, then probably that indicates that a host system is needed (until there is hardware-based ZFS?!?) Rackmount solutions would be semi-acceptable, although I don't really have a rack at home to properly mount it.
• ZFS: ZFS definitely is not for general consumers yet, at least in the sense of administering zpools and datasets. However, since I already use ZFS for work, I'm not going to count this as a disadvantage. Hopefully Apple and/or Sun will find a way to make ZFS transparently available to the masses soon and I can stop searching.
• Interface: USB isn't horrible, but my preference is Firewire if possible. Only my Windows and Solaris boxes don't have Firewire.
• NAS vs. direct-attached: Since there's no hardware-ZFS yet, the focus is going to be mostly on an enclosure that can be directly attached to the host system. So this kind of rules out NAS appliances somewhat.

Okay, what I really want is a home-version of the Sun X4500 disk server, which holds 48-drives. This box was built for ZFS. But I don't see a consumer version happening real soon :)

Sun Fire X4500

My current storage scheme is your typical home hodge-podge of older and newer drives slapped together. My external Firewire drives are all bare drives encased in the very well-built FW 400/800 enclosures from Other World Computing. I have purposely used only <320GB drives (primarily Seagate Barracudas IDE/SATA) for my drive mechanisms.

This decision was based largely on the growing evidence that consumer drive failure rates are rising, perhaps inversely proportionally to their rising capacities (500GB -> 1TB). If you listen to the Security Now podcast, co-host Steve Gibson (author of the SpinRite hard-drive recovery/repair software and well-known hard drive expert), has mentioned his penchant for buying the smallest drives he can, since he has seen the quality of newer large-capacity drives trend downward.

If you look at the customer reviews on many of the large drives sold on NewEgg.com, you'll see a noticeable streak of users bitten by the bad failure rates of these new drives. Of course web site reviews aren't the equivalent of a scientific survey (like Google's semi-recent study of drive failures) but I don't think they can be completely discounted either.

I'm currently leaning towards some of drive enclosure hosted off of either a Mac or Solaris 10 x86 server so that I can run ZFS on it. With Solaris, of course, would just use ZFS as-is. With a Mac, I'd try using the ZFS on Mac software, with a Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5.x) system. I haven't used it yet (need to get some more drives) so not sure how feasible the Mac approach is yet.

For now, I'm assuming any drive enclosure is going to be either eSATA (hosted on x86 or Mac) or Firewire (hosted on a Mac). As I start to sift through what I can find, I will post "consideration reviews" as I compare different products to my needs.

My Solaris servers are just a pair of Ultra 5's. While I have stuffed 3 smaller drives into one of the Ultra 5s (by using the bracket for putting a drive in the floppy spot and another I think has taken the place of the optical drive), I'm not sure a lowly workstation is up for full-time ZFS use. It's fine for testing ZFS but I've read that ZFS on an IDE has performance issues (which might be fixed now). However, I'm willing to rebuild one of my 5's just to try it out anyway.