[ikkun]

my NAS needs are pretty simple, I basically just need HDDs on LAN. I have like a dozen arch linux machines and my old HDDs were already using ZFS from trueNAS, so I want with arch + ZFS, using zfs-dkms and linux-lts.

I don't know that I can recommend arch+zfs to someone not familiar with arch linux though. zfs isn't in the standard repository so you have to either add the archzfs repo or add an AUR package. most people probably expect a NAS to auto update, arch linux sometimes needs manual intervention for updates, which I only tolerate because I update multiple arch linux systems at the same time. and with zfs being out-of-tree, sometimes kernel updates can theoretically break it, though with linux-lts that seems to be very rare.

I have a remote system for security footage with debian+btrfs, which has basically none of these issues. installation is easier, btrfs is built into the kernel, I've had no trouble with automatic updates, it's been rock solid. btrfs still does the important stuff like software RAID, snapshots and scrubbing, and it's much easier to add more drives compared to ZFS. just note that I think btrfs has a bit worse performance. totally adequate for a 2.5 gigabit NAS, but a little slower for random access if you do work directly on the NAS like I do. it's also historically not been as reliable as ZFS, but that reputation seems years old at this point.