How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS (2024)
If you need a basic NAS and don't care about GUI features, it is suprisingly simple to set up a ZFS dataset and share it over the network using Samba.
AI Summary
Setting up a minimal ZFS NAS is surprisingly simple using Debian 12 and Samba, without needing commercial solutions like Synology, QNAP, or the full-featured TrueNAS suite. The key advantage of ZFS is that all configuration is stored on the disks themselves, so if the OS is destroyed, the data and RAID configuration can be recovered on any machine by running `zfs import`. The article outlines a basic setup with RAIDZ1 (single-drive redundancy), 16 GB ECC RAM, and a low-cost Xeon CPU.