Yeah media is a good use case for it, and doesnt really need cache either.

It can’t, you lose space efficiency if the disks you add aren’t the same size as the old disks.

It has no parity, you can pair with snapraid but thats snapshot parity and not real-time parity. Depends on the use case if that would work or not.

The difference is I can do something about my downtime and fix it.

Linux/opensource naming can be the wildest stuff.

The big thing is very easily mix and match different sizes of disks. ZFS as of recently can sort of do that, but its not as efficient.

It seems like every Linux distro I’ve used both of those will work fine.

Surely restic or borg would be better for backups?

Rsync can send files and not delete stuff, but there’s no versioning or retention settings.

The downside is it’s against their ToS, and you could have your account banned or similar if they do decide to take action.

My plan was to install Proxmox and run TrueNAS on top of it

Proxmox runs ZFS natively already so there’s not much reason to bother with TrueNAS IMO. If you need SMB shares and that sort of thing you can run a container and mount the ZFS volume into it.

I currently have 4x900 GB 10k SAS Dell Enterprise drives but I intend to bump that up to 10x900 GB over time. I’d like to be able to add these without much hassle

If you want to easily add drives later on then as far as I know the only good option is the controller in HBA mode with unRAID in a VM. Hardware RAID or ZFS don’t make adding drives very easy.

I’m wondering if using ZFS with the RAID controller in HBA mode will be more worth it than a dedicated RAID setup

I think ZFS RAID with HBA mode on the controller is worth it vs traditional hardware RAID, it’s more portable, less reliant on hardware.

And if I’m using a RAID setup, should I go RAID or unRAID? If I go RAID, is RAID 01, 10, or 60 a better option here?

With 10 drives I would probably do ZFS RAIDz2 if this was my setup. (RAIDz2 has 2 parity drives like RAID 6).