For a long time now I've been meaning to migrate my home file storage over to a ZFS server but the project kept getting postponed due to other priorities. Finally it's alive!

For the last ten years or so my home fileserver has been through the general purpose debian box in the garage. It has three disks, one for the system and home directories, a larger one which gets exported over NFS and the largest one which backs up the other two (nightly rsync). It has been an adequate solution, in as far as I've never lost data. But whenever a disk dies I always have several days of downtime and have to scramble to restore from backups and maybe reinstall.

There are many articles about this topic that make for good reading if you're considering the same. My goals were:

1. Data reliability, above all.
Initially I had visions of maximizing space, mainly for the geek value of having many terabytes of home storage. But in the end, I don't really need that much. The NFS export drive on my debian box was currently only 500GB and that was used not only by the shared data (pictures, mostly, and documents) but also for MythTV storage. Since I wasn't planning on moving the MythTV data to the ZFS pool, even 500GB would be plenty adequate for some time.

2. Low power consumption.
Since this is another server that'll need to run 24/7, I wanted to keep an eye on the power it uses.

3. But useful for general computing.

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