File system or OS with self-healing and spin-down

[Darkoon]

Hi SNB Forum,

this is my first post in this forum, so please excuse any possible oversights about the forum rules and customs.
I am seeking advice for which file system and operating system I should choose for my custom build NAS. Any help is appreciated.

I am currently building my very first NAS:
ASRock N100DC-ITX
32 GB RAM
1x 2 TB M.2 SSD for Cache (and possibly NAS OS)
2x 18 TB HDDs (Possibly up to 4 more in future with some SATA PCI card. Even then, I will only use one parity HDD.)
1x external 18 TB Backup (for infrequent manual backups)

The NAS will host some home automation and possibly some simple services like a password manager, Nextcloud and alike. However, I will mainly use this NAS as an infrequent backup for my various devices, so I don't care about the performance at all. The HDDs should be able to spin down and not run 24/7, without too much strain on them. So, UnRaid came to my mind at first. Especially if I increase the number of HDDs in the future.

However, in my life I have experienced multiple occasions of bitrot and am quite vary of this threat to my data. So I am quite envious of something like ZFS with automatic self-healing ZPools.

Is there something out there, which can do both and possibly work well with my other Linux, Android, and Windows devices alike?

Thanks in advance for any guidance

 

[sfx2000]

WIth ZFS, to keep things consistent across the drives, keep them spinning... keeping a drive up and running uses very little power compared to the rest of the server...

Most of the drive failures I've seen with spinning rust - they die on startup...

 

[Tech Junky]

If you want capacity and less spinning you could look into U.2/U.3 drives, A 15.36TB would get you well beyond the consumer M2 options for about the same price as an 8TB M2.

 

[ddaenen1]

I am running TrueNAS Core which i like very much. It is FreeBSD based and does everything it needs to do in terms of file storage, sharing and much more. I am running two jails, one with Plex and one with Nextcloud. You might want to consider TrueNAS Scale though which is the latest and greatest and Linux based. Both use ZFS as file system.