Well, true 'nuff, the argument about how much one's time is worth comes into play. At the time I set up The Box, I had spare time on my hands and I used it as an excuse to learn FreeBSD. If I had to do it again? Maybe I'd spend the money on (or install) something more fire and forget.

A thought: you can get 5 drives in a Microserver by stripping out the CD bay. Again, time.

Another thought on RAID5: from a discussion about RAID and large disks, I can quote my IT guru here: "As always, this is a standard risk calculation. If the data matters, you don't use RAID5. And with big SATA drives you are often best off using RAID6 (even with 4 disks) as it has the highest recovery coverage."

I can ask him to explain further why this is the case, but I'm assuming double error parity is better than single for recovery.

As with everything, it comes down to you usage. For me, it's long term backup of large files (video data) that I don't need online access to, since the projects go onto faster local storage when in use and then move back to the slower, larger NAS when packed away.

Do you need bandwidth critical storage? Or if it's primarily Time Machine backups, your first sync is the one that takes the time and then it's small, incremental updates. In that case, maybe it's slower, cheaper drives and a slower interface.

Like you I have nearly no idea what I'm doing. However, i's educational doing it.

ZFS though? Proper space technology. Raid-Z (1, 2 or 3 vs RAID5, RAID6 or "RAID7"), self-healing data, automated snapshot and rollback of data, on the fly storage compression.

If I had to do it again (or I upgrade The Box in the future), I'd go with FreeNas 9 or Nexenta Community to avoid having to muck about in BSD. Open source, yes, but still reasonably turnkey, and they both appear to provide the latest ZFS implementations which older FreeBSD versions do not.