Greetings,

I have a N54L Proliant Microserver I've been using that runs a linux
software RAID1 with two 1 TB drives at home. I'd like to fill up the
remaining next two bays with 1 TB drives for more space and additional
redundancy (aiming for two drive failure). Performance is not a huge
factor as it is a home server (I say this as the four bays use a port
multiplier, not a raid card). The OS runs on a separate drive and SATA
channel (so, 5 total SATA drives are possible), perhaps it's worth
doing 5 1 TB drives and throw the OS into the mix?

That said, I attended last years presentation on ZFS, and have even
played around a little with thumb drives and Linux on ZFS with no
issues. The server supports ECC, however I already purchased the RAM
for it as non-ECC and 16 gigs worth, so I'd hate to throw away that
investment to purchase more expensive ECC. Is it worth considering
even using ZFS on Linux with non-ECC? The presentation leaned toward
no, and that is the general consensus I'm seeing on forums. So,
perhaps stick to a software Linux raid6?

Here are are my wants:
* Rock solid reliability and data integrity; I back up to Crashplan
via headless nightly, but would like to minimize any dependency on
this
* Needs to survive the rare, but inevitable power failure; perhaps a
UPS or other recommendations?
* Must be able to have minimum 2 drive failure
* Snapshots would be nice
* Support for encryption would nice, which the software raid option
gives me, am familiar with setting up LUKS

Based on a lot of recent tests, I'll probably go with Western Digital
drives for the cost savings and longevity, unless anyone has other
suggestions?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

--
Jeremy MountainJohnson
Jeremy.MountainJohnson at gmail.com