I need to create a private cloud and I'm searching for the best setup. These are my 2 most important requirements 1. Disk and system redundant 2. Price / GB as low as possible The system is going to be used as backup setup which will receive data 24/7 over SFTP and rsync. High throughput is not that important. I'm planning to use glusterfs and consumer grade 4TB hard-drives. I have worked out 3 possible setups 3 servers with 11 4TB HDD Setup up a replica 3 glusterfs and setup each hard drive as a separate ext4 brick. Total capacity: 44TB HDD / TB ratio of 0.75 (33HDD / 44TB) 2 servers with 11 4TB HDD The 11 hard-drives are combined in a RAIDZ3 ZFS storage pool. With a replica 2 gluster setup. Total capacity: 32TB (+ zfs compression) HDD / TB ratio of 0.68 (22HDD / 32TB) 3 servers with 11 4TB consumer hard-drives Setup up a replica 3 glusterfs and setup each hard-drive as a separate zfs storage pool and export each pool as a brick. Total capacity: 32TB (+ zfs compression) HDD / TB ratio of 0.68 (22HDD / 32TB) (Cheapest) My remarks and concerns: If a hard drive fails which setup will recover the quickest? In my opinion setup 1 and 3 because there only the contents of 1 hard-drive needs to be copied over the network. Instead of setup 2 were the hard-drive needs te be reconstructed by reading the parity of all the other harddrives in the system. Will a zfs pool on 1 harddrive give me extra protection against for example bit rot? With setup 1 and 3 I can loose 2 systems and still be up and running with setup 2 I can only loose 1 system. When I use ZFS I can enable compression which will give me some extra storage.