I always staked on ZFS before the merge, using a number of SATA SSDs in a simple stripe configuration, adding more as my space requirements increased. The merge imposed additional load on my disks that meant my setup was no longer appropriate; this sent me down a long road of testing and optimization. Let me say this up front, there are definitely more performant setups for this than ZFS. I've heard of very good results using mdadm and a simple ext4 filesystem (XFS also works). However, there are so many useful features baked into ZFS (compression, snapshots) and the ergonomics are so good that I was compelled to make this work for my (aging) setup.
I settled on a single fio benchmark for comparing my different setups, based on sar/iostat analyses of working setups. It is as follows: sudo fio --name=randrw --rw=randrw --direct=1 --ioengine=libaio --bs=4k --numjobs=8 --rwmixread=20 --size=1G --runtime=600 --group_reporting. This will lay down several fil
