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I highly recommend the BYO route, especially if you have part of a suitable machine already lying around. Just about any x86 based system that can take 16GB+ of memory will be a good candidate. ECC is recommended but many people, myself included, have run many stable years without ECC. Load the latest Ubuntu up and give this [1] ars how-to article a read (keeping in mind it is several years old now). Power efficiency will mostly hinge on the cpu and how many hard drives you keep spinning. To scale past the the number of SATA ports you have on a motherboard, add an LSI HBA card like the 9300-8E or 9207-8E.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/ars-w...

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I bought a mini-ITX board with 4 SATA ports and an embedded CPU. I added a PCIe card with 2 additional SATA ports. I bought a mini-ITX case with mounts for 6 HDDs. I have 5 8TB drives (RAIDZ2) and 1 SSD as the boot drive. The system runs Ubuntu Server.

I found this setup a lot cheaper than the dedicated NAS boxes you can buy and more flexible.

Can you post a link to that Mini-ITX case? Thanks.

I’m not the parent but I built something similar in the Fractal Node 304 which supports six 2.5” drives. Mine’s been going strong for 7 years now.

https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/node/node-304

Thanks.

That's exactly the one I have.

Yes please, can you post the brand/model of that case?

>ECC is recommended but many people, myself included, have run many stable years without ECC.

zfs requires ECC[0][1], do not skimp on this.

I ran many zfs pools for >8 years without issues until silent memory corruption happened to me, and now I can't access my data anymore (zfs won't let me mount a zpool that fails scrub checks).

0: Oracle (and previously Sun) documentation recommends ECC to prevent silent corruption:

>Consider using ECC memory to protect against memory corruption. Silent memory corruption can potentially damage your data.

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-1448/zfspools-...

1: https://louwrentius.com/please-use-zfs-with-ecc-memory.html

Please stop repeating this lie that ZFS somehow needs ECC more then other filesystems.

All filesystems benefit from ECC memory but ZFS from all filesystems does its job best even without ECC.

Page 102 from https://is.gd/bsdstg here.

I'm getting bored repeating this over and over again.

The problem isn’t that ZFS needs ECC more. It’s that other filesystems will silently ignore the errors that ZFS points out. With other filesystems, you data just eats some corruption. With ZFS, you’re likely to encounter errors because you notice them - Because it’s extensive checksumming points out when a bit flips.

I’d much prefer to know, but if you’re used to not knowing, knowing is scary.

As the sibling comment says, ZFS does not _require_ ECC. It's your data that requires it. Whichever filesystem you use. If you care about the data, of course.

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