Hello, Has anyone given any thought to the choice of using ZFS over individual files on file shares vs. ZFS over iSCSI? I can think of the following issues and considerations: ZFS over individual files stored on standard file shares (e.g. NFS or CIFS) on another computer (some of the ZFS blogs describe creating small files, and turning them into a pool, in order to test out the various ZFS features. Here I''m extending that to a larger scale, across a network.) -does not require a whole drive to be turned into a block device (this assumption may be wrong if iSCSI implementations can use a partition of a drive rather than a whole drive) -easier to share the drive with other types of data (see above assumption) -easier to move the individual files that make up the ZFS pool to new drives (simply copy?) -can use built-in file sharing mechanisms like NFS or CIFS (does not need any iSCSI support on the machine hosting the hard drives) ZFS over iSCSI, connected to a hard drive on another computer -requires a whole drive to be turned into a single block device (this assumption may be wrong if iSCSI implementations can use a partition of a drive rather than a whole drive) -cannot share the drive with other data (unless it can be partitioned, see first item) -needs iSCSI support on the machine hosting the hard drives What about these factors? -protocol overhead and performance difference -differences in NAT traversal capability (does one handle NATs better? Not that I recommend running ZFS through a NAT... ) -iSCSI operates at a lower level than file shares...might this also give ZFS access to better error detection, kind of like how ZFS is best run directly on the drives, rather than on top of a hardware RAID? Thanks, -hk