Opinions on safety of dropbox ???

[Mike O'Dell]

initial RegFD disclosure:
my day job invested in BOX instead of DropBox

one biggest reasons was the technical sophistication of 
the founders and engineering team. the DropBox folks
understood the questions about security architecture
even if their insights weren't novel.

FreeNAS is very good stuff. 
The best way to do local storage is mirrored pairs of drives.
Yes - that uses half the storage for reliability
but it resilvers the fastest and with 4 Terabyte
drives so stupid cheap, you want ease of maintenance.

You can then do striping on top of the mirrored pairs
("Raid-10") and run ZFS RAID-Zx

but the simplicity of fixing a set of mirrored pairs
is as easy as it gets.

There are a couple of new ITX *server* motherboards
which have ECC memory, a Haswell processor and 
8 Sata-III ports (along with a couple of other SATA
ports for the root filesystem).

Do NOT build a fileserver without ECC memory!
You will live long enough to regret it deeply.

    -mo