How my homelab storage evolved over time

I appreciate that I spend a not insignificant amount of time talking about ZFS here, the only volume manager and file system I trust with my important data. ZFS came from my beloved Sun Microsystems, and today FreeBSD has the best ZFS integration outside the illumos ecosystem. But the topic came up on a call recently: what did I used to do before this combination of FreeBSD jails, bhyve, Xen, and ZFS spoiled me? I’ll admit, I did nothing exotic. I basically had workloads split into two “NAS” machines: A Debian machine using XFS. I knew that XFS had metadata verification, which I figured would be an improvement over ext2/3/4. If you have a UPS or a clean power feed (as I’m sure anyone running expensive SGI systems did), XFS on Linux performed well. Problem is, a power failure would trash XFS hard. One particularly ill-timed outage in Malaysia at the time corrupted so much data that I swore off it, even though I was the first to admit I wasn’t using it appropriately. A FreeBSD system…