It likely would. One of my concerns is that I’d need multiple disks to take advantage of its s/w RAID implementation and possibly SSD to take advantage of other nice features.
My basic logic here is if my standard Ubuntu setup is 5% slower than ZFS, I’ll still do just as well as long as MaidSafe round-robins PUT and GET requests to all vaults that aren’t total crap. If this assumption is wrong, then ZFS won’t help you, because in that case only high end setups (which may involve ZFS, of course) strategically colocated in fast, low-latency datacenters would farm SAFE (I wrote about this reasoning in Feasibility of datacenter farming (and the risk of farmer centralization)). That would be a whole new world and you could basically retire your homegrown rig at that point.
That’s why I intend to stick to the KISS principle (say, Ubuntu 14.04 containers on Ubuntu 14.04, few non-RAID-ed HDDs) until I am proven wrong.
Could be.
I have one of those small NAS boxes and those are quite useless (ARM CPU and 512 MB RAM - pretty useless), so as long as it’s got at least 1-2 GB of RAM and a better processor, that could work.