It's a repurposed gaming PC, so a 1st Gen Ryzen 1800X, 32 GB RAM. Took out the good GPU and bought the cheapest card I could find to support a tiny monitor for maintenance, but generally I manage it from my primary windows machine with X2Go (just a remote X server/client over SSH for Windows), and ssh directly if I'm on one my linux boxes.
Note if you go this route, I've had bad luck with the DKMS builds of ZFS where they sometimes fail to install during kernel upgrades, so I use the binaries from the archzfs repository. Sometimes I have to wait for the repo maintainer to build new packages to keep up with arch kernel releases, which is annoying, but it's preferable to getting a broken system back up and running. I've also had bad luck with ZFS-on-linux native encryption, with my system intermittently seg-faulting when reading from an encrypted dataset under heavy load. So I use LUKS/dm-crypt on top of ZFS (the LUKS volumes are unlocked at boot, then the ZFS pools are imported). However I suspect this is a hardware peculiarity with my system, as I can't find any mention of the same issue online. So YMMV
It's a repurposed gaming PC, so a 1st Gen Ryzen 1800X, 32 GB RAM. Took out the good GPU and bought the cheapest card I could find to support a tiny monitor for maintenance, but generally I manage it from my primary windows machine with X2Go (just a remote X server/client over SSH for Windows), and ssh directly if I'm on one my linux boxes.
I use this SATA expander card to fit 8 4TB HDDs (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008J49G9A/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...) for the main array, and have a 64 GB SATA SSD for the OS.
OS is Arch Linux, which I'm partial to for the AUR and documentation. For the root drive I just use ext4. I initially got started with Arch's ZFS wiki pages: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ZFS https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ZFS/Virtual_disks
Note if you go this route, I've had bad luck with the DKMS builds of ZFS where they sometimes fail to install during kernel upgrades, so I use the binaries from the archzfs repository. Sometimes I have to wait for the repo maintainer to build new packages to keep up with arch kernel releases, which is annoying, but it's preferable to getting a broken system back up and running. I've also had bad luck with ZFS-on-linux native encryption, with my system intermittently seg-faulting when reading from an encrypted dataset under heavy load. So I use LUKS/dm-crypt on top of ZFS (the LUKS volumes are unlocked at boot, then the ZFS pools are imported). However I suspect this is a hardware peculiarity with my system, as I can't find any mention of the same issue online. So YMMV
Some resources for dm-crypt/LUKS: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Device_encryption https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/System_configurati... https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Encrypting_an_enti...
Hope it helps, with the exception of the native encryption issue I found ZFS to be remarkable easy to use and bombproof so far. Have fun!