The system is using ECC and I specifically - unrelated to ZFS - wanted to use ECC memory to reduce risk of data/fs corruption. I've also added 'ecc' to the original blog post to clarify.
Edit: ZFS for home usage doesn't need a ton of RAM as far as I've learned. There is the 1 GB of RAM per 1TB of storage rule of thumb, but that was for a specific context. Maybe the ill-fated data deduplication feature, or was it just to sustain performance?
Thanks, and all good - it was my fault for not following the link in this story to your post about the actual build, before starting on my mini-rant.
I'd heard the original ZFS memory estimations were somewhat exuberant, and recommendations had come down a lot since the early days, but I'd imagine given your usage pattern - powered on periodically - a performance hit for whatever operations you're doing during that time wouldn't be problematic.
I used to use mdadm for software RAID, but for several years now my home boxes are all hardware RAID. LVM2 provides the other features I need, so I haven't really ever explored zfs as a replacement for both - though everyone I know that uses it, loves it.
Edit: ZFS for home usage doesn't need a ton of RAM as far as I've learned. There is the 1 GB of RAM per 1TB of storage rule of thumb, but that was for a specific context. Maybe the ill-fated data deduplication feature, or was it just to sustain performance?