I'll throw my opinion in the ring on this one. If you are/work for a company with a budget, buy a commercial filer. If this is for personnel use and you really care about the data that you store, I would recommend you store it on a ZFS file system. Specifically a ZFS file system utilizing multiple hard drives in a RAID configuration with parity. There are SO many options of RAID configurations you can do with ZFS, I'm not going to suggest a specific hard drive configuration, as it depends on size of drives, and how many you got.
Why ZFS? The ZFS file system has an abundant amount of high level features that you can easily take advantage of, and personally to me, features that I care about. One of the greatest features, in my opinion, is that when you write data to the file system, ZFS will perform then store a checksum of the data (I can't remember if it's at the block level or file level for the CRC). When you go back to read data from the disk(s), a CRC is again performed against the data, thus you and the file system know if that data has been corrupted. If it has been corrupted, and you configured your ZFS file system to contain parity, ZFS will fix the data for you on the fly. Alternatively, you can run a scheduled check of the whole disk, or specific volumes of the disk, at a regular interval to see if you have any corruption. Please note, this does not prevent corruption from what some software could do, or inadvertent file overwrites by a user. To clarify, it protects from corruption of the physical disk (ie disk failure, bad blocks, etc) or also from bitrot. You can argue if bitrot is a thing or not, with MY data, I lean on the side of caution.
Another great, and supper cool, feature is snapshots. ZFS snapshots work on the volume level, they are supper cheap and supper fast. What I mean is that when you tell ZFS to create a snapshot, it almost instantaneous. A it's cheap, because when you create a snapshot, it doesn't cost you any disk space. I know that sounds strange if you haven't dealt with snapshots before, but it's only the changes or additions to the disk / ZFS file system that happen after the snapshot that grow. I'm not explaining it entirely great, just google how file system snapshots work.
>>1066735
>Is there any advantage to using ZFS over a hardware RAID card?
I would answer this with yet ANOTHER great feature available with ZFS. ZFS does not need, and most time not want, a RAID controller, especially if it's a "smart" raid controller (fuckin HP p410s). Hardware RAID can be great, but ZFS is all about software RAID. The software part is what gives you so much more control over your file system, which is cool. One upside of NOT requiring a RAID controller is that your data is still safe if your RAID controller goes out. I have heard, and know personally, people who have relied on hardware RAID controllers to store their data, but the controller craps out. Guess what, without that controller, the computer doesn't know how to read the data from the disks. You can't just replace it with any old RAID controller, you generally need the exact model replacement, and often times, with the SAME firmware version you were running on the controller card that died. So that's FUN! With ZFS, you can pull your drives out a system, put it in some other system, hooked up in different order, to even include slaving internal disks via USB, and mount them using the ZFS file system. Your redundancy in ZFS is not dependent on a hardware controller.
