Build: Home NAS

OK, so I've built a few network attached storage solutions and bought a few over the years and wanted to outline my new project:

Goal: Get a ZFS filesystem NAS box built and running

A FEW WORDS ON ZFS:
The ZFS filesystem offers some pretty cutting edge features not found in any other filesystem.
Bit Rot. Ever heard of this, it's freak-in awful and befalls all stored data, the statistical probability that data will be corrupted by a bad zero or one. SO movies get black spots, music gets skips, etc. This can not happen with ZFS thanks to checksums at the block level.
Data Deduplication. Ever have multiple copies of the same files. Starts to take up a lot of space on your storage system. What if the storage could detect that all those files were identical and actually store only one copy and just reference it multiple, times, like shortcuts. ZFS does that.
Compression. What if data could be compressed before it was stored on-the-fly in real time and then uncompressed whenever it was accessed. It would save a ton of space, kinda like ZIP compressing everything but without the manual interaction. ZFS does that.
Replication. Say you want to have two or three storage devices keep backups of your data. ZFS will keep them all synchronized.
Snapshots. Like in a Virtual Machine, but with an entire filesystem you can take a snapshot of everything, a go-back-point that you can recover to. But not just entirely, you can now revert to any prior copy of any file or folder of data at anytime. The ultimate revision system. ZFS does that.
Much more...
There are 8-12 things ZFS does that no other filesystem can accomplish and that isn't the real focus here. I already accept that ZFS is way better then any other way I could ever store my data.

So, the point is to build a home brew system that can do it, I spent $800 on mine, plus HDDs:

You'll want a case that can hold 6-8 hard drives. I chose the Silverstone Tek Premium Mini-ITX DTX Small Form Factor NAS Computer Case (

$243 DS380B SilverStone Technology Premium Mini-ITX/DTX Small Form Factor NAS Computer Case, Black (DS380B)

DS380B), it holds 8 3.5in drives. and another 4 2.5in drives. A 300w power supply is fine.

Put in a ASRock Motherboard, Mini ITX DDR3 1600 LGA 1150 E3C226D2I. Has on-board 6x SATA 3 controller, supports ECC RAM.

I popped in 2x 8GB Kingston "cheap" ECC RAM

Added an Intel E3 quad core processor (Intel Xeon E3-1230V3 Haswell, 3.3GHz, 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1150)

Now all you need are hard drives. Since my mother board only handles 6, I got QTY=6 of the WD black drives 2TB. You could easily get 3TB or 4TB WD red drives for the same price. I recommend the WD RED drives, designed for this purpose.

I installed FreeNAS onto a USB stick, 16GB. That's it. Works flawlessly. I set my drives up into a RAIDz2 array. Basically a software RAID configuration with 2 spares. So the storage of 4 drives with two spares.

This is all available across your gigabit ethernet and wireless connections.