I personally think of a small DIY rack stuffed with commodity HDDs off Ebay with an LVM spanned across a bunch of RAID1s. I don’t want any complex architectural solutions since my homelab’s scale always equals 1. To my current understanding this has little to no obvious drawbacks. What do you think?
All I know about ZFS is that there are weird patent or closed source encumbrances or something. I hear it’s good, and it seems popular, I just avoid proprietary Oracle products.
As for btrfs, the only thing that’s claimed to be unstable is raid 5 or 6. And people use it in production saying the claims are overblown. I don’t. I use it in raid1 mode. But raid1 in btrfs doesn’t require a bunch of matching drives. It lets you glom together a number of mismatched disks and just puts every block on more than one of them. So it’s a nice cross between a raid and LFS or JBOD.
There’s a thing called OpenZFS. With ZFS happened almost the same thing as with Java. Oracle bought a company and tried to close ZFS, but people just reimplemented ZFS under a FOSS licence and community. I don’t know who uses Oracle ZFS nowadays. Everyone uses OpenZFS.
It’s true that there’s some licence incompatibility that doesn’t allow integrate OpenZFS into a Linux core, but it’s not like ZFS is proprietary
https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/License.html