If you&#x27;re just using it as &quot;dumb&quot; storage, then ZFS gets you block-summing, so better data integrity guarantees - but in order to rely on that you need ECC RAM, which means a server-class CPU (and more $$$ for RAM). The Avoton range of Atoms do support this (I&#x27;m potentially looking at getting an 8-core one myself in the next 6 months).<p>Other than that, if you&#x27;re not planning to exploit any of ZFS&#x27;s functionality, and are looking to deploy on as cheap hardware as possible, mdadm RAID1 (with LVM over the top) is just the ticket. If you need to expand, just add another mirrored pair, assign it a physical volume, add that to the volume group, expand your logical volume, then expand your filesystem (ext4 supports online resize and is very stable, XFS is also a solid contender). All of this is fairly boring compared to ZFS, but it works and it works well..