the p3 idea is not gonna fly for ZFS:) this filesystem demands more cpu/ram
so i ended up using a e4300 cpu for 1.8ghz core 2 duo.. 8gb of ram...
using 4 x 1TB drives... i set up a RAIDZ1 Array which is giving me 2.6TB of fault-tolerant space
(allows for 1 drive to fail and still the data will be accessible)
so far its working excellent i get speeds of up to 140mb/s writing to the drive, im assuming the read speed is similar..
this is over a gigabit network switch of course
heres some more info on different RAIDZ setups available under nas4free server
https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html i may bump it up to e8200 because why not, its the same TDP and maybe itll be faster to generate parity data for the raidz1
any other raid5 performance was crap using the legacy UFS filesystem but ZFS is performing quite well with core2duo cpu + lots of ram