I feel like hardware raid is relic from the pre multi core CPU days, given that was less than 20 years ago it makes me feel old

Can confirm that moving a zfs array to a new system after a failure is simply connect the disks and zpool import -f <pool_name>

Every raid card I use now is put in hba mode it’s just simpler to deal with

I can recommend the nanopi r4s, supported by openwrt, ipfire and I think opnsense. Ive been using it as my main router for almost a year now on a symmetric 1Gb connection. Best part is it’s super cheap and tiny

I went through this at the beginning of the year, it get 900/900 fibre, settled on openwrt running on a nanopi r4s. My other options were a nanopi r6s with openwrt, or nuc type hardware/server running something like pfsence/opnsence etc. The openwrt install took about 5mins then a couple of hours of exploring various menus options etc, which I didnt end up changing.

The r4s doesn’t have eMMC where as the r6s does. I just left the SD card as rw, I’m not too concerned about failure, I’m hoping for some wear leveling built in, if not SD cards are cheap. I should probably clone the disk and have a cold spare SD card.

Storage wise I’m using 17. 63MiB of 29.38GiB, I think I may have bought a too big SD card Ram usage is around 88MiB of 3.87GiB I have got a couple of more things to set up like wireguard but as it stands I’m glad I went the openwrt route over a full server install

I looked at the nanopi r4s and the r6s when I replaced my router. I did consider doing it all myself but in the end settled on the r4s running opwenwrt, I think it took all of 5mins from download to working system. The benefit been the openwrt image has uboot included so only one image need writing, also web interface out of the box

Don’t think of it as an installation, it’s writing image files to disk. I prefer using gparted or disks when working with partitions. Then use dd for the actual writing as I can quite easily see I’ve got the right partition from gparted/disks. Got that wrong a couple of times 😅

I’ll counter the other comments. It’s not any more difficult to maintain than any other service. What is a pain is the spam, and as I run it for a business the users. The biggest problem I have is other mail servers been incorrectly configured for SPF, DKIM and dmarc , usually it’s things like external billing platforms that have been integrated incorrectly by customers and suppliers. Spam is now starting to come though with all the proper headers for SPF and DKIM

I did see a m.2 based expansion card based on ASM1166 chipset, or failing that a sata port multiplier, but those depend on the data port supporting it