Time is merely a perspective. I’ve been doing this for 20 years.

Perhaps it is overblown, but one of the reasons I have 8 drives is because I wanted to run raidz2 for the extra redundancy. I’ve had multiple drives die before and so as disk sizes have gone up more redundancy has been important (at least I thought so).

So when my first ZFS NAS (4 disks) developed hardware failure, I decided to get more serious about it. Hence larger rack device with a proper Xeon with ECC memory and an HBA for 8 disks + 2 SSDs and the old drives that survived as a play space. I’ve also used this server now for 9 years.

Node 304

That is a really nice small form factor case. I was recently looking at Fractal’s Define 7 XL because it can hold an amazing 18 3.5" + SSDs.