I've had enough real life experience with replacing drives in the ZFS pool in my home NAS that I feel comfortable sharing this information with the community.

I recently decided to indulge my inner geek by doing a hardware refresh on my home ZFS file server. The system had served me well since moving to ZFS from my previous system but there was room for improvement.

My file server is full and I have no options for expanding it. The server is a white box system running FreeBSD with a hardware RAID card and 400GB of RAID-5 storage. The hardware is old, the hard drives are old and I can't expand it. It's time for something new.