Lowcost home file storage,
HP Proliant Microserver (mine is N60L me thinkz) Can get cash back on it if you look around (sometimes 35% back) ECC memory 8gb max (recommended if going for ZFS) Western digital reds 3tb x 4 (reds have 3 year warrently and built for raid) ZFS in raid 2 i think. (one disk redundancy)
Total space is about 7.9tb
Running FreeNas from a usb inside the case.
it works, and cost wise it was cheap minus the drives.
I was not certain about ECC being particularly important when using ZFS, so I dug [0] and discovered a multitude of intriguing resources about ZFS robustness.
Apparently, ZFS has no built-in detection or recovery mechanisms where memory corruption is involved.
HardOCP [1] led me to an academic investigative study about ZFS robustness [2]. Many conclusions were drawn, including:
In the last section we showed the robustness of ZFS to disk corruptions. Although
ZFS was not specifically designed to tolerate memory corruptions, we still would
like to know how ZFS reacts to memory corruptions, i.e., whether ZFS can detect
and recover from a single bit flip in data and metadata blocks. Our fault
injection experiments indicate that ZFS has no precautions for memory
corruptions: bad data blocks are returned to the user or written to disk,
file-system operations fail, and many times the whole system crashes.
-
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=zfs+ecc
[1] http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1689724
[2] http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/zfs-corruption...
So basically, you've got until newyears to get one ordered.
CCLonline[2] and ebuyer.com[3] are offering the servers for £180, so £130 after cashback.
I've got one already at home and plan on ordering two more tomorrow. Surprisingly powerful boxes, can take upto 16gb DDR3 (ecc unbuffered), internal USB and proper hardware virtualisation.
[1] http://h41225.www4.hp.com/UK_focus/PA0074%20-%20HP%20Microse...
[2] http://www.cclonline.com/product/108949/704941-421/Branded-S...
[3] http://www.ebuyer.com/430446-hp-proliant-g7-n54l-2-2ghz-micr...
PS> "zfs in raid 2" -I believe you mean raidZ, the zfs equivalent of raid5. raidZ2 (zfs raid6) would only leave you with approx 6tb usable space rather than the 9 you're quoting. As the microserver has only 4 drivebays (well, 5 if you use the optical bay) you'd probably get better speeds and same real space by using the zfs equivalent of raid10 rather than raidz2.
It will also work win _non_ ECC ram -though if you've got ZFS on the go it's highly recommended.