Yup. Most people's expansion difficulties are due to retarded pool configurations. If you accept that 1. disk is cheap and 2. mirrors, whilst expensive in terms of disk capacity are way better performance and more flexible, zfs rocks.
People seem to have it stuck in their head that bigger RAID numbers are better, but RAIDZ/RAIDZ2/RAIDZ3 are only really useful when you're dealing with HUGE numbers of disks and performance is not so important. Normally you're far better off creating a larger number of VDEV mirrors, both in terms of performance and in terms of flexibility.
Which brings up another point - those not used to dealing with enterprise storage may not realize that you can/should/maybe want an array with more than one RAID group in it. They end up putting all their disks in one big VDEV which sucks for performance and flexibility, then blame ZFS for not being flexible.
Read how it works, don't make retarded choices based on ignorance, and you'll be fine.
1 GB of RAM is worth about $20 these days anyhow (less?).
And yes, de-dup is expensive. Most of the time in my experience you get far better benefits from compression anyhow (source: real world enterprise datasets at work).
CPU and RAM overhead is not "required". If you want to do things like in-line de-dupe, sure. If you use retarded ways of setting up your pools, then sure, expandability sucks.
The rules aren't "wierd", they are just different. The big mistake people make with ZFS is diving into it without reading any of the documentation on the assumption that they know what they're doing because they've used other filesystems before.
Don't do that. Have run ZFS for years, it's awesome.
US has had BS cheap airfares for decades.
Here in Australia you're talking $300-400 to cross the country. And that's a cheap flight.
Media slant - beware. Russians will likely tell you that this is because the humanitarian aid convoy they sent got attacked. Presumably, they are sending more supplies and defending them this time.
Which version is true? Probably the truth is somewhere in the middle. Both sides use propaganda in any confrontation - not just "the bad guys".
This man has claimed shit loads of things that have been pure crap. Do you really need references?
Such as? If you're going to post such things, you need to back them up.
You will have many recoverable tape errors.