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Depending on what you use your server for, backup/restore across a 1Mbit/sec uplink may be a non-starter in practical terms - it's just not fast enough. Of course if you can do the primary sync locally and your dataset changes very little (so you only need to back up small amounts of data), and...

There are plenty of options - it all depends what features you deem to be most important. If growing the array by one or two disks at a time is an important feature for you, and you don't want raid10, then ZFS may not be the best choice. You can grow ZFS, but there are restrictions in how...

What performance figures do you get without the ZIL SSD? With large sequential I/O, you may find sync writes are just as quick (or slow depending on your viewpoint) without a separate ZIL log device.

Issues like this can be caused by the disk, controller, psu and/or cabling. If your other pools are functioning OK, then there's a good probability that the PSU is OK (though you can confirm this when you switch the cabling round) Start at the basics, and do one thing at a time only Switch...

Yes, such solutions do exist, and aren't that uncommon TBH.

In my experience, hot-plug and hot-swap are not quite the same thing - though I suppose it's semantics at the end of the day. Hot-swap (as many LSI raid controllers support) literally means pull one disk out (amber light lit or not), insert another and walk away - the array takes all...

To be fair, the advice to go ZFS was certainly reasonable given the information in the original post - however the goalposts were later moved when "provide something that monkey-brained techs can walk into the server room at another site, see an amber light and pop in a new disk that rebuilds...

It's really a toss up between options 1 + 3, IMHO! Option 1 can survive any two disk failure, whereas option 3 can only survive some two disk failures. Madrebel's suggestion of 2x 3-disk mirrors can survive any two disk failure, and some 3/4-disk failures, but has the highest capacity cost -...

Have you run memory tests for a decent period - say overnight? Weird problems like this can sometimes be caused by a flakey DIMM!!

Personally I wouldn't bother with FCoE in the home - if you really need 10g speeds I'd look at 10g ethernet using copper CatX cable. As to dedicated ZIL devices and L2ARCs, be sure you actually need them first before jumping in - you can always add them later if you need to. Finally, your...

You could take a look at Snapraid - it's an application you run to provide raid style protection, but you can implement it with your current data - plus the latest versions have a pooling feature so that all your data drives can be made to appear as one - best of all it's free - all you need to...

Snapraid is fine on Linux - Ubuntu or Mint are probably the easiest as they have a repository! Windows is always an option too of course, though personally I'd only repurpose an existing OS - I wouldn't pay money for an OS when Linux can do what you want as well or better, for free!

Strictly speaking DXVA is not required as long as your CPU can cope with all the decoding duties and a Core2Duo should (I assume you mean Core2) - however the CPU is a general purpose computing unit processor and will consume a lot more power during decoding than the dedicated DXVA decoder on...

Depending on your motherboard's options, you may be able to save some power by underclocking the CPU (perhaps even undervolting too) - though this needs proper testing to make sure you don't go too low.

The arrays you are looking at are designed for enterprise/DC deployment - they don't much care about how much noise they generate, but I suspect that in the your theater room this might be an issue for you - so I'd check around on that front first! I've no idea how noisy these particular arrays...

A quick and crude way to do it would be to create a directory containing symbolic links to all your zfs mount points, and then share out that directory. Not sure if ZFS' CIFS server would like it, but Samba should work (you'd have to edit smb.conf to allow symlinks).

Are you being paid every time you manage to fit in "ZFS is a terrible choice for a home media fileserver"? Snapraid is fine as long as you are happy to administer all your drives as seperate entities - it has no pooling capability. It's also fine as long as you accept that it has no online...

Hmm, your pool appears to be in an inconsistent state now. Which OS did you perform the disk replacements under? If it was NAS4Free you may have to boot that and see what what state the pool is in under that OS - don't forget to export the pool from Ubuntu first! Failing that, if your data...

Yes, all these can be handy features, and they may go a long way to making snapshot style raid a good fit for some. However, a few of the less attractive features of snapshot style raid are (off the top of my head) Every data upload becomes a two stage process rather than one. You have to...

What exactly have you done so far, when did you do it, and what commands have you used?

Well, no data storage solution is "maintenance free", or at least not "admin free" anyway! Personally I don't think ZFS is any more burdensome on that front than the typical alternative options (and it's less than some - eg Linux with LVM and mdadm). Many options (inc some ZFS based solutions)...

Me too, but I guess we'll see when the resilver process ends... As to the disk replacement itself..... If you start with: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM tank ONLINE 0 0 0...

No matter which SSD you use, throughput will always be slower for sync writes than it is for async writes - this is just a side effect of the extra I/O involved with sync writes on ZFS. Yes, you could speed things up a bit using the very fastest SSD available, but TBH I think you'll be in the...

Can you post the current output from "zpool status" on Ubuntu, and list the exact commands you used to attempt the replacement. Before and after "zpool status" outputs would be handy too! While personally I don't think switching OS in the middle of a problem is a good idea, did you ensure that...

Presumably those who believe ECC is an absolute must on a ZFS server, also insist that all machines manipulating the ZFS server's data also have ECC memory, and I presume they also set sync=always on all the ZFS server's datasets! :) ECC memory is a desirable feature, so spec that if...

You can try Sol 11.1 and see if you like it, but I'd strongly suggest creating your pools at version 28 or below - if you subsequently find you like Solaris and decide you have no intention of moving away from it, then you can upgrade the pools to v33/34 later! However, if you find you don't...

Seems like a reasonable plan - playback of movies/music etc is mostly sequential I/O. However, mixing 4TB drives into a new raidzX pool along with your current 2TB drives might be interesting :). It's doable, but you may have to be creative, depending on the layout/config you want!

That picture could just as well be the back of an oven.....;):D

FYI, the Corsair AX range are based on the Seasonic X Series!

It's bit too simplistic to just say you need XXX watt PSU to support 24 drives properly. It depends on the drives, the PSU in question and the setup they are used in. If you can't configure for staggered spinup, then you need to spec the PSU to spinup all the drives simultaneously (plus...

If the damage is localised, then as omniscence said, you can "map" that area out using partitions. Running a disk scan under HDTune (free version) will give you a good idea of how to set up the partitions - it does a sequential scan of the drive and basically tells you where the damage is. If...

1a - Whatever you buy in the computer world is "obsolete" within a few months - fact of life these days - that doesn't mean it won't still do the job you originally bought it for though! 1b - Then you're a bit stuffed :) Either stump up the cash for a new Synology unit and hope there is...

Off-the-shelf NAS units are fine, especially if you want a turnkey solution in a wife friendly package. The major downside is cost TBH - not inc the disks (which are the same price either way) you are looking at around 3x the price against a new PC based NAS (obviously depending on what exactly...

BTW - you may have to export and then re-import the pool after deleting the sparse file (but before you copy any data), to get the pool properly recognised as degraded.

You "should" be able to do this using a sparse file the same virtual size as the 5 disks (or larger). You'd have to do all this from the OS command line though! Create the pool using 5 disks plus the sparse file, and then delete the sparse file itself before you copy any data to the pool...

You can build a server for peanuts if you look carefully on eBay - minus the actual drives of course (which you are better getting new)

It looks like it's just a rebrand of Dataram's ramdisk product - looks nothing new TBH! You have to consider that memory used by a ramdisk can't then be used as memory cache by the OS - unless you have a lot of spare memory, you could end up reducing overall system performance! Can be good for...

Glusterfs is a possibility (free too). You'd have to run in replication mode though, so there's a 2x storage overhead compared to a "standard" failover cluster (where you can export/import the pool(s) onto different nodes), and it's not lightning fast (the replication is done over the network)...

Can you not just run SAMBA on the ZFS servers instead of using ZFS inbuilt CIFS?

You shouldn't lose any writes as long as that's the only failure. At least in more recent ZFS implementations, the main pool is updated from ARC in main memory (or rather the transaction groups stored in the ARC), not from the ZIL - the ZIL (whether it's on a log device (eg SSD) or in the main...