As I mentioned earlier, I have been leaning towards a more home grown solution to implementing ZFS at home. But I'm willing to do my due diligence and see what appliances are out there.

First up is the Buffalo Technology has their DriveStation product line. At the low-end is the DriveStation Turbo (available in USB and USB+Firewire-400 flavors). I pretty much have to rule these out, for my purposes, since these are single-drive units only.

The first multi-drive model is the DriveStation TurboUSB (2x500) (a bit of an unwieldy name?). It sports two 500GB drives. No where on their site or product datasheet does it denote what RAID levels it supports. However, by deduction it seems it only does RAID 0 (as you'll see in a bit), so that would be 1TB when "spanned" (as their product information says) using RAID 0. Limited to USB only. Not really a contender given the drive spanning, and it's only 2 drives. Of course you can do ZFS on even a single drive or two drives, but not quite the what I had in mind. Also, as the name implies it interfaces with the host system via USB.

Drivestation Duo

The next multi-drive model is the DriveStation Duo. Now here, the blurb specifically states "RAID 1", so this is slightly more advanced than the Duo. USB and Firewire-400 available, which is good. As of this writing, it can go up to 1.5TB if spanned across both drives. But of course, we want some sort of redundancy, so RAID 1 would give 750GB of usable space. Street prices seemed to start at $750.

Finally we get to a 4-drive model, the DriveStation Quattro. The Quattro supports RAID 0 (striped), RAID 1 (mirrored), RAID 5 or JBOD (4 separate drives). It has USB interface for to the host. I'm not sure if it also a eSATA port, since the comparison chart says it does not, but the specifications details on the product page says it does. So this would hold up to 1.5TB with four 500GB drives (the max individual drive size per their specs) in RAID 5. At the time of this writing, clicking their "Buy Now" button for the 2.0TB configuration only shows Amazon carrying this model, for just under $950.

DriveStation Quattro

Lastly, their DriveStation Quattro TurboUSB is essentially the same as the Quattro, except it has bigger drive sizes available and apparently faster transfer rate (hence the "Turbo"). Individual drives at 250GB, 500GB and 1TB. Oddly, clicking to "Buy Now" for both the 2TB (total capacity) and 4TB (total capacity) model yields no merchants carrying it. The 1TB (again, total capacity) model shows multiple hits around $500. It also has USB and eSATA interfaces.

For ZFS, only the Quattro models really would be of any interest since they have more than 2 drives and support JBOD. The Quattro TurboUSB 1.0TB might be okay at $500. Not sure what the 2 and 4TB models run. The Quattro 2.0TB might be a possibility, although $950 seems a bit steep for my wallet for the storage component alone.