NAS - ZFS system versus NTFS or EXT4 system

I wrote a blog article for Super User about my ZFS-based NAS, which I built about a year ago. I'd strongly recommend ZFS - the article summarises the main benefits for a NAS, and here's a good detailed description of ZFS's features (see the show notes, and from about 28 minutes into the video).

I get satisfactory performance with a 2008 dual-core Atom CPU, and 2 GB of memory. And obviously it's far cheaper than the pre-made devices from QNAP, Drobo, Netgear, etc.

FreeNAS's web interface does make setting-up and managing the NAS fairly straightforward, although there is still some ZFS lingo to get used to. Other than the learning curve, the main disadvantage of ZFS is that it can be awkward or impossible to add a new hard drive to an existing storage pool, while maintaining the redundancy of RAID-Z.

What has changed since I wrote the blog article is that "FreeNAS 0.7" now has the unfortunate name NAS4free, and what used to be called "FreeNAS 8" is still called FreeNAS 8. It'd still recommend NAS4free, because of the lower recommended hardware requirements and better features, such as the Transmission BitTorrent client. NAS4free also has a newer version of ZFS: v28 rather than v15 in FreeNAS 8. This adds deduplication (although this needs lots of memory!), among other features.