Thanks a lot for this slideshow. I learned a lot from it and together with the hardware suggestions thread, it really made me reconsider what I want to build for a NAS. I guess I'll hold off for now and rather move my pfSense installation to a low power consumption build first.
I still have a few questions, though. First, how are hot spare drives handled, if at all? I presume they should be part of the vdev from the get go, but are they then "invisible" until needed? Or do they count towards the amount of recommended RAM?
Second, you specifically warned against running SMART tests while a Scrub is taking place, but does regular reading/writing of data during a Scrub pose any threat to data integrity? I'm guessing no, but it's something I wouldn't want to let up to chance.
Thanks in advance.