No, that's useful. I'm hesitant to roll my own because the last time I rolled my own I was up a creek without a paddle. I've learned that all-in-one solutions are really good for when you don't want a geometrically-expanding list of things that might have gone wrong... been there, done that. With a completely packaged solution, at least there's tech support of some sort (and often a community) that can provide advice on the whole system, rather than shotgunning piecemeal answers. My experience with WD is that their drives are great, but the shit they put in front of it isn't exactly Mac friendly. That's one thing that soured me on the EX4. The Synology has 6 USB ports, 4 network ports and 2 eSATA ports. Whether or not you can dial into them when the host goes tits up I don't know; far as I'm concerned, if the host goes tits up it's time to go shopping anyway. WTF is up with ZFS, by the way? Seems like all the little NAS boxes want to run it, but OS X, Win and most flavors of Linux don't speak it at all. Thus my adventures in knoppix, which were the opposite of fun and empowering.
The GPL is incompatible with Sun's license, so it has to live outside the kernel. There's a FUSE implementation, and a recent loadable kernel module I haven't played with, but whether either is installed out of the box depends on your distro. The kernel module is almost surely the better choice now that it exists.
There are a couple of OsX implementations as well, OpenZFS and Zevo.
I have no idea about the state of ZFS on Windows.WTF is up with ZFS, by the way? Seems like all the little NAS boxes want to run it, but OS X, Win and most flavors of Linux don't speak it at all. Thus my adventures in knoppix, which were the opposite of fun and empowering.
That was my plan, along with using a distributed filesystem like glusterfs to replicate data across the network as backup. Unfortunately "time to go shopping" was ~1 month in on the second device (It was in a sub-optimal power situation...). A few hours, I had one machine with 7.5 TB of space and going on 4 months of uptime. ZFS has been historically BSD-only. Newer versions of the linux kernel are starting to support it, but I'm doubtful of the stability of a core module that hasn't undergone 10+ years of testing in the wild. It's got neat stuff to ensure data reliability on the drives, but if most people mount their storage over SMB (Windows shares) / AppleTalk, both of which negate the problem of ZFS support on OS X / Windows. Not sure about eSATA / USB...Whether or not you can dial into them when the host goes tits up I don't know; far as I'm concerned, if the host goes tits up it's time to go shopping anyway.
WTF is up with ZFS, by the way?
By the way, now that I'm back in town, I thought I would share...THE NETCLOSET: http://imgur.com/a/XihhA It's since gone through a number of changes, and is no longer quite so much a fire hazard. Sadly, the water pipes still remain.