After came back from California, I bought a HP ProLiant MicroServer for its 4 hard drive bays. The machine was upgraded to 5(1+4) GB ECC RAMs, and added two more Seagate Barracuda Green 1.5TB 5900RPM HDDs. Without any confidence of storing important data (e.g family photos, research data and drafts) on the 3 years old LeCie 1TB USB disk, I decided to build a FreeBSD + ZFS solution this time for the sake of ZFS’s ultimately end-to-end integrations. The two seagate disks are configured as mirrored ZFS pool, and the LeCie 1T one is formatted as an individual ZFS pool without checksums (Because I do not really care about the data on it). Now I have 7+ TB hard drives at home! It is way to geeky!
The detailed NAS configurations are similar to my previous home NAS solution (e.g Netatalk, Avahi, Samba, Transmission and etc.), with the exception that there is no a decent Dropbox solution on FreeBSD, which actually adds the complexity for me and my wife to backup data around. I did look for building a Debian within VirtualBox, in which the home directory was mounted to the FreeBSD disks. Unfortunately, NFS clients lack the support of inotify that is required by Dropbox monitoring the local file changes. Though there is a potential solution: let the debian virtual machine using local file system (e.g Ext4) and rsyncing the Dropbox directory to FreeBSD every so often. But I just think that it is too much for a Dropbox application.