At the moment I have my NAS setup as a Proxmox VM with a hardware RAID card handling 6 2TB disks. My VMs are running on NVMEs with the NAS VM handling the data storage with the RAIDed volume passed through to the VM direct in Proxmox. I am running it as a large ext4 partition. Mostly photos, personal docs and a few films. Only I really use it. My desktop and laptop mount it over NFS. I have restic backups running weekly to two external HDDs. It all works pretty well and has for years.
I am now getting ZFS curious. I know I’ll need to IT flash the HBA, or get another. I’m guessing it’s best to create the zpool in Proxmox and pass that through to the NAS VM? Or would it be better to pass the individual disks through to the VM and manage the zpool from there?
And if you dont have ECC zfs just might save your bacon when a more basic fs would allow corruption
It might also save it from shit controllers and cables which ECC can’t help with. (It has for me)
I don’t think ZFS can do anything for you if you have bad memory other than help in diagnosing. I’ve had two machines running ZFS where they had memory go bad and every disk in the pool showed data corruption errors for that write and so the data was unrecoverable. Memory was later confirmed to be the problem with a Memtest run.