I went the “cheap” route and built an Ubuntu headless server with native-ZFS. Advantages of the setup:
- ZFS is brilliant
- Adding more storage is as simple as the Drobo, just swap out a bigger drive and it will auto expand
- If the hardware dies (and it has) I can just import the ZFS pool on to any other computer
- It’s probably not actually cheaper but since I don’t have a home computer (I just use a laptop) it works well because it can run Plex and all my other server software.
- I threw torrent sync on it for easy backup/sync.
