Like other people have said, it’s going to depend on what you want to do with the NAS. If it’s going to be a pure NAS (ie network storage only), then using onboard will be fine. If you plan on doing other things (home assistant, media server, etc), I recommend going the virtual machine + HBA route.

I used a hodge-podge of chinesium parts and leftover drives to create a DAS system that hooks up to an HBA via DAC. I’m actually kinda surprised how stable it’s all been.

“Extensive manual reading” Really? Two seconds of skimming is extensive reading to this guy?

Maybe I’m the exception here, but this thing reads to me like a long list of non-issues. I specifically don’t want my phone fast charging. It’s bad for the battery. I’ll slow charge overnight. People having to keep track of multiple cables is a result of them trying to save $2 and buying the cheapest possible cables. Buy good cables with the highest data transfer speed you will require and forget about it. They are all backwards compatible.

The point of USB-C wasn’t to make everything compatible with everything always, the point was to get rid of proprietary connectors, and unify the 4 different USB connector types commonly in use.

Measuring my server cluster

Personally, I just don’t ask questions I don’t want the answer to.

I’m learning to hate it right now too. For some reason, its refusing to upload a local image from my laptop, and the alarm that comes up tells me exactly nothing useful.

It’s a function of ZFS itself. Data that is to be written to the drives is first written to RAM, then transferred to the drives. One of the benefits of this is that if you are moving a file that is smaller than the available RAM, your transfer won’t appear to be limited to the write speed of the drives.

ZFS. It can use up as much RAM as you care to give it for caching. So if you are slinging a lot of data back and forth, more RAM is better. Especially if you are using HDDs instead of SSDs.