| ZFS likes RAM and uses it to get better performance (and don't think about using dedup without huge ram), but you don't need it and can change the defaults. ECC tends to attract zealots after a perfect error-free existence which ECC does tend towards but doesn't deliver, it just reduces errors. I personally don't care about a tiny amount of bit rot (zfs will prevent most of this) and rebooting my storage machine now and then. You can run ZFS/freenas on a crappy old machine and you'll be just fine as long as you aren't hosting storage for dozens of people and you aren't a digital archivist trying to keep everything for centuries. Real advice: * Mirrored vdevs perform way better than raidz, I don't think the storage gain is worth it until you have dozens of drives * Dedup isn't worth it * Enable lz4 compression everywhere * Have a hot spare * You can increase performance by adding a vdev set and by adding RAM * Use drives with the same capacity |
To add to that, ZFS dedup is a lie and you should forget its existence unless you have a very specific scenario of being a SAN with a massive amount of RAM, and even then, you had better be damn sure.
I really wish ZFS had either an option to store the Dedup Table on a NVMe like Optane, or to do an offline deduplication job.