I ran a 6x2TB raidz2 pool for years built with Seagate greens pulled from Craigslist-bought USB external drives. FreeBSD and/or ZFS were always dribbling stuff to disk (logs, metadata updates, etc.), so the drives never spun down. These were using the native motherboard SATA ports.
ZFS is very reliable. Sometimes a scrub would find a problem and fix it. I'd then offline the device causing problems, assuming the sectors were getting "soft", and then I'd run a destructive read/write badblocks on it to flush out bad sectors, then reintroduce it to the pool. The drive would be once again be solid for a good long while.
I'm anxiously waiting for the day inline encryption makes it to FreeBSD's ZFS, as the standard GELI+ZFS method has always seemed a bit clunky to me.
ZFS is very reliable. Sometimes a scrub would find a problem and fix it. I'd then offline the device causing problems, assuming the sectors were getting "soft", and then I'd run a destructive read/write badblocks on it to flush out bad sectors, then reintroduce it to the pool. The drive would be once again be solid for a good long while.
I'm anxiously waiting for the day inline encryption makes it to FreeBSD's ZFS, as the standard GELI+ZFS method has always seemed a bit clunky to me.