http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/26/canonical_in_zfsonlinux_gpl_violation_spat/

@wirestyle22 said:

Question: Isn't the advantage of ZFS modern advances like striping, device pooling, block level CRC, etc?

Simple answer: no. Many of those things are equally negatives. Why would you want striping or device pooling in your filesystem?

@Dashrender said:

Right, but when you're working with files that large - why bother storing them in a VM - just st.... OK yeah, that goes against the standard practice now.. so we need a VM, even if the whole host is a VM - welp, I guess your stuck with XFS 🙂

Pretty much. EXT4 is pretty silly for a server of any size, which is why even for desktops RHEL is XFS by default and EXT4 only as an option for advanced users. EXT4's days are pretty much over.

Not really. I'll do it in a few years when it's time to upgrade disks. But most of that will end up in Amazon Cloud Drive soon.

@DustinB3403 said:

Scott have you ever looked at this, http://zfsonlinux.org/

Quite a bit 🙂

I would recommend looking at StarWind SA for example.
That solution fits your requirements perfectly, it will also provide you with HA storage that will ensure the business continuity.
As for support, they offer a single point of contact no matter what issue you face, plus the system will be shipped to your site fully preconfigured and pretested.

The FreeNAS community really shows just how important it is to avoid products like FreeNAS. It's built on good tech, but the issues are that the community is horrible, only tiny non-storage expert shops use it and it is broadly misunderstood. FreeNAS doesn't make any of the technology, they just repackage it. So the vendor and their community all lack the basic knowledge of what they have and the stuff that they repeat just gets worse and worse.

If this was the FreeBSD community, talking about the same technologies, the answers and approaches would be completely different. Enterprises use FreeBSD every day. They do not use FreeNAS. Once you limit yourself to a "non-expert" product, the idea of using a community for assistance causes a breakdown in dangerous ways.

@MattSpeller said:

Learned a lot about RAID from you, it's been fun to learn! Now can you teach me how to get a job as a hardware monkey? 😄

Grab a sledge hammer

This one was an easy fix, but that the issue exists at all is a fragility unique to FreeNAS that does not exist if you only use FreeBSD:

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/911053-freenas-database-corrupt

@scottalanmiller Netgear needs to get on here! Who ya know?