Originally Posted by MJT5282
FreeBSD also supports ZFS well, though no vendor runs FreeBSD out of the box, as far as I know.
I'm running a number of home-built FreeBSD NAS servers. I couldn't get the performance I needed from any of the "prosumer" products, and the "enterprise" brands are way overpriced for what they deliver. My systems each hold 32TB in an enclosure 5.25" tall:

2 servers in rack
Server internals

These systems can read or write at 400Mbyte/sec continuously for days, with 10-second burst rates exceeding 4Gbyte/sec. They're limited by the Gigabit Ethernet network ports - at some point I'll add 10Gigabit cards and re-run the network throughput benchmarks.

These systems have 48GB of RAM, dual E5520 CPUs, and a 256GB PCIe SSD as a ZFS accelerator.

At this capacity, backups become a good deal more challenging. I'm using offsite servers (connected by 2 Gigabit Ethernet links) for replication as my first line of defense, and I have a 48-tape LTO4 robotic tape library (so, 48 * 800GB before compression) which I use to make regular backups, which go in a vault at a different offsite location.

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