Built In Network Attached Storage (NAS) using OpenZFS
Hardware Setup
The hardware of the Eanix Home Server consists of a varying number of SATA3 ports. Depending on which home server option you go with, the number of drives change and will eventually max out the number of ports. There is no hardware raid for the SATA drives. Some versions of the home server include hardware raid 5 or raid 1 on 3 or 2 M2 NVMe drives, respectively. This is for virtual machines and not for long term storage. The cheaper options include only 1 M2 NVMe drive while leaning more heavily on backups in case of failure.
OpenZFS
The SATA drives all use OpenZFS. OpenZFS is a great filesystem for the home and offers checksums for increased reliability and power failure tolerance. Most versions of the home server use RAIDZ1, which is the equivalent to a RAID 5, having 3+ disks with only x-1 drives available for storage capacity. For increased security this can be layered on top of VeraCrypt encryption so that everything written to disk is encrypted at rest.
The lower end versions of the home server use mirror, which is effectively a RAID 1, and 2 drives gives you 1 drive of storage. This is the minimum available option with our home servers so that if one fails you still operate and can replace it.
Management
The SATA drives are passed through to the NAS virtual machine directly and no layer exists on top of the drives other than VeraCrypt if you chose to use encryption. Drives are managed from the web interface, where you can back up your drives to an external USB or even the cloud (Storj). There is no way to partition the drives into smaller disks and all SATA storage exists as one large drive mapped under /data. VMs other than the NAS virtual machine access it over SSHFS, which has proven effective in day-to-day tasks.
The M2 drives in RAID mode have the virtual machines on top of them and do not contain long term storage other than virtual disks set up to be databases for speed. These can be created in the management console