- Building a minimal ZFS NAS without Synology, QNAP, or TrueNAS is simple for basic needs without GUI features.
- Key requirements: Debian 12 OS, RAIDZ1 with 4x4TB NVMe SSDs, 16GB ECC RAM, and OpenZFS implementation.
- ZFS is self-contained; disks can be moved to any machine with ZFS tools and imported to recover data.
- Step 1: Locate disks using lsblk, map aliases via /etc/zfs/vdev_id.conf for convenience.
- Step 2: Create zpool with ashift=12 for performance, set compression and mount points, create datasets like docs and backups.
- Step 3: Install Samba, create user, configure smb.conf to share datasets over network, enabling Time Machine support.
- Benefits include avoiding full-featured NAS software complexity and leveraging ZFS's portability and dataset management.