[pixl97]

I mean, pretty much if you want to learn anything you're going to have to put a lot of time into it. With ZFS it will be building different servers with different disk layouts and figuring out how to test and benchmark those options. Which just takes an absolutely massive amount of time.

I know, I was doing just that 5+ years ago.

Commercial storage vendors aren't really any different. Mostly the biggest difference here is they offer a very limited subset of hardware and disk configurations and tend to iterate over that very small configuration space. Step outside of that config space and they won't have much insight.

This remind me of the earlier days of Mac vs PC. Mac tended to have a very small hardware set of supported devices, and in many ways helped stability. PC supported pretty much anything you threw at it, which commonly had issues with crappy drivers and untested interactions.