OpenZFS on OS X

Hey guys,

I was looking for a storage solution and kept gravitating towards Synology's SHR mode or Drobo's BeyondRAID for the ability to swap disks out of the storage pool one at a time to increase storage.
From what I can tell, ZFS supports this with RAIDZ, though it looks like there is more work I have to do on my end to integrate a new drive into the pool via the terminal vs an automated turnkey solution.

I was really wanting an expandable pool of direct attach storage via TB3 without getting locked into my initial drive configuration like traditional RAID. Drobo seems to offer that; but they haven't shipped a product in 7 months and I see nothing but reports of hardware failures and support nightmares. Synology offers SHR, but only offer 10Gbe on their highest end enclosures (usually with add-on cards), and I'd have to add a 10Gbe to TB3 adapter to my system which just inflates the cost even more.

If I bought a Promise Pegasus32, would ZFS allow me to have a single-point-of-failure proof storage pool that can expand in the future as I replace drives with larger drives? Is this a good or proper use-case?

Thanks,
Dan

You can indeed increase the pool size, by replacing a disk one at a time, and letting it resilver in between.
Yes, generally that means you will issue some commands via terminal, but you also have to physically change the drives out, so the terminal commands seem like
a tiny effort in comparison. Generally, you issue "zpool pool /dev/disk6 /dev/disk6", when you are replacing disk6 with disk6 (assuming they go in the same physical space, and get the same disk name).

at the very end, it will automatically grow larger (if zpool set autoexpand=on), or after you issue (zpool online -e pool).

There is even a trick with ZFS you can do, if you want a 5 disk pool, but only have 4, and put the 5th one in later.