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I'm looking to build a NAS for home use with 8-10*(2-4TB) drives, out of which 2-3 drives would be used for parity via software RAID.

In the past years and up to date, ZFS seems to have become the most suggested solution for such a scenario. However, ZFS comes with all those benefits at a price. It needs a powerful CPU, lots of ECC RAM(16GB+), and even some L2ARC SSDs, or else you'd be risking the following: slow transfer speeds and losing the whole array.

I'm thinking that I might find a less expensive solution, and obviously with less features that could suit a few things that I need:

  • max needed RAM: 4-8GB ECC RAM
  • less CPU hungry than ZFS, I'm thinking at an Athlon II 45W CPU
  • no need for features like deduplication, snapshots, compression, etc
  • protection from write-hole and other similar RAID issues(which I might not be aware of in this moment)
  • some sort of data integrity checking/checksumming(it can be 3rd party)

Are you aware of such alternatives?

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    Do you already own the drives, or are you investing in an entirely new system? ZFS might not be the best choice if you have a range of HDDs of different sizes. If buying a completely new system, the cost of 8-10 HDDs dwarfs the cost of the other components. With 6 * 3 TB in RAID-Z2, I opted for: i3 4130, 16 GB ECC, and without L2ARC. It maxes out gigabit ethernet, and cost about 1000 GBP including HDDs.
    – sblair
    Apr 12, 2014 at 23:48
  • What motherboard did you use?
    – Nick
    Mar 27, 2016 at 18:08
  • The ASRock E3C226D2I. It supports ECC memory, has 6 SATA slots, has dual Intel gigabit Ethernet, and has a really handy internal USB port (next to the SATA ports) for plugging in the FreeNAS boot drive. Of course, that was two years ago, so there may be other options available now.
    – sblair
    Mar 27, 2016 at 20:19

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