I ran a 6x2TB raidz2 pool for years built with Seagate greens pulled from Craigslist-bought USB external drives.  FreeBSD and&#x2F;or ZFS were always dribbling stuff to disk (logs, metadata updates, etc.), so the drives never spun down.  These were using the native motherboard SATA ports.<p>ZFS is very reliable.  Sometimes a scrub would find a problem and fix it.  I&#x27;d then offline the device causing problems, assuming the sectors were getting &quot;soft&quot;, and then I&#x27;d run a destructive read&#x2F;write badblocks on it to flush out bad sectors, then reintroduce it to the pool.  The drive would be once again be solid for a good long while.<p>I&#x27;m anxiously waiting for the day inline encryption makes it to FreeBSD&#x27;s ZFS, as the standard GELI+ZFS method has always seemed a bit clunky to me.