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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

We discussed this topic [soylentnews.org] some in December 2015, so this is perhaps a continuation:

Many home NAS builders consider using ZFS for their file system. But there is a caveat with ZFS that people should be aware of [louwrentius.com].

Although ZFS is free software, implementing ZFS is not free. The key issue is that expanding capacity with ZFS is more expensive compared to legacy RAID solutions.

With ZFS, you either have to buy all storage you expect to need upfront, or you will be wasting a few hard drives on redundancy you don't need.

This fact is often overlooked, but it's very important when you are planning your build.

Other software RAID solutions like Linux MDADM lets you grow an existing RAID array with one disk at a time. This is also true for many hardware-based RAID solutions. This is ideal for home users because you can expand as you need.

ZFS does not allow this!

To understand why using ZFS may cost you extra money, we will dig a little bit into ZFS itself.

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