System architecture
Choose based on how much you value appliance simplicity, platform control, expansion flexibility, and responsibility for maintenance.
Best fit
Users who value integrated management, known appliance workflows, and a quicker route to shared storage and backup tasks.
Best fit
Users who need control over hardware, ZFS or other platform choices, and a deliberately designed growth path.
Decision rule
Choose the operating model you can maintain. The best storage design is the one whose updates, backups, and recovery instructions you can keep current.
Editorial record
Maintained by Make Your Own Tools to turn “Store data safely” into a defined capacity, bays, redundancy, and recovery baseline. The references below provide the technical context for this planning path. Its calculation rules and planning assumptions are documented in the methodology, and affected calculations pass regression checks before the review date advances.