I want to get a home file server to hoard data (mostly media and books) and I'm considering what should I use. I've been thinking about FreeNAS, but apparently ZFS corrupts your data unless you are using server-grade ram, and that limits you to server-grade motherboard and that kind of setup gets expensive.
I just want to have something small, quiet and that consumes relatively little electricity.
What is your setup and why?
The chances of data corruption because of non-ecc ram is present on any filesystem, that's why you have to scrub them once in a while if you can, the nice thing about COW filesystems is that you can detect and repair such corruption which is already a once in a billion chance(unless your ram is actively trying to fuck with you).
Depending on your budget, the chinks on aliexpress have small NAS motherboards with ~14 Sata ports, if you want something more upgradable just build a regular PC with PCI-E SAS cards and SAS to SATA adapters.
Also depending on your use the 1GB of RAM per TB might not apply, specially if you add an SSD as cache.
I can post my own setup if you are interested.
ZFS simply tells you about the corruption that would have happened on any other filesystem, it will repair it automaticly if you have it set up. Use freenas, I typically recomend people use Ubuntu with zfs if they get it but if you're thinking about using zfs you can create your pools on freenas and migrate them to other systems later via import/export methods.
>to scrub them once in a while
What exactly do you mean by "scrubbing"?
>if you want something more upgradable
Not sure what exactly I'd want to upgrade except RAM and more hard drives
>I can post my own setup if you are interested.
Please do
Like everyone else is saying, use FreeNAS unless you're comfortable enough with ZFS to use it on a plain Linux/FreeBSD install.
>unless you're comfortable enough with ZFS to use it on a plain Linux/FreeBSD install.
I'm comfortable with Linux, but FreeNAS just comes with all the convenient stuff like web interface out of the box. I don't want to spend too much time configuring everything from scratch.
>What is your setup and why?
An Opteron 4000 with some server-grade RAM and a server motherboard in a server chassis.
>I don't want to spend too much time configuring everything from scratch.
Then just use linux+zfs, if you actually do know linux and aren't just a webdev then you'll find zfs absolutely amazing. Ubuntu supports it out of the box via "apt install zfsutils", don't boot from zfs until they support it, performance for root devices is horrid unless you are a ZFS dev.
>>I don't want to spend too much time configuring everything from scratch.
>Then just [do it from scratch]
Oof.
Honestly though I wish I'd done this. FreeNAS is kinda vague when it comes to granularity, and it gets annoying. Still, having a proper interface was nice, and constrains me from doing stupid shit that might otherwise harm my data.
I'm also terrified to update FreeNAS since so many versions lost their damn mind on my platform.
Do an 8 drive RAID 0.