[cogman10]

I dove into ZFS for my home lab as a relative novice.

It's not terrible, but there are a few new concepts to come to grips with. Once you have them down, it's not terrible.

If you don't plan on raiding, IMO, ZFS is overkill. The check-summing is nice, but you can get that from other filesystems.

Maintenance is fairly straight forward. I've even done a disk swap without too much fuss.

The biggest issue I had was setting up raid z on root with ubuntu was a PITA (at the time at least, March of this year). I ended up switching over to debian instead. Once setup, things have been pretty smooth.

[j1elo]

Two things I like from it, as per what I've read so far:

* Checksumming

* As you mention, easy maintenance

* Snapshots and how useful they are for backups

In the end what I value is stuff that works reliably, doesn't get in the way, and requiring minimal supervision. And in the particular case of FS, I'd like to adopt a system that helps avoid bitrot in my data.

Could you drop some names that you would consider as good alternatives of ZFS?

[cogman10]

For close to ZFS feature parity but much younger, BTRFS.

Otherwise it's sort of figuring out what features you want to drop. XFS and ext4 are probably where I'd look for a single disk hard drive.

Like I said, you could do ZFS, but definitely feels a bit like overkill. Setting up a vdev with one disk just to get snapshots and checksums seems like a lot.