Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

a friendly guide for building ZFS based SAN/NAS solutions » ZFS Build. Reminds me that Bob has said that while I use DroboPro on a Mac Mini and a Synology 1812+, the real thing I want is a homebrew ZFS server. Reading a little about ZFS, it sure does seem attractive.
People like Sonnet have definitely been hacking away. You can buy an enclosure for you Mac Mini that has two Thunderbolt ports and two PCIe slots as well.
By the way the story of ZFS on Mac is a little sad. It would have been great to have ZFS on the Mac and made my life easier. Sadly, Apple cancelled the project and all that was left was an open source project called MacZFS and then Zevo which is now part of another company. I loaded MacZFS and it seems to work although it is hard to remove (and don’t take out the hard drive that you have it running on because the Mac will just crash hard. You are warned). Looks like Zevo is the thing to load, although probably it makes more sense to use OpenSolaris and Oracle really support ZFS now. It does run on OpenBSD though.
Or just bite the bullet and build my DYI NAS as they describe. Given all the fun we’ve been having with the Aquarium PC, that doesn’t seem so crazy. They have a $6K enterprise class build which seems bit of oan overkill, but what the heck, maybe there is a chassis with a generic build that I can load or maybe I can just replace all the Synology software with the a ZFS build running Linux.
There is a Linux port of ZFS up now. The big and somewhat sad issue is that ZFS is licensed under a different scheme than Linux GPL, so you can’t distribute a binary with both of them, you have to build it yourself! So if you use Ubuntu, you can do this pretty automatically by installed a package of ZFS and then compiling. So not a big deal.