I partially agree with you, specifically on not really needing something as high performance as ZFS to host simple media files which will be mostly sequential. The highest bitrate I have currently for my collection is about 80 Mbps, so that would be well under what a single disk can handle. Even with a free streams going MergerFS + SnapRAID will probably be fine. The only issues I have with such a large array and using MergerFS + SnapRAID is I feel iffy about parity check for such a large pool, and the eventual instances of bitrot down the line.I personally can't understand why one would use ZFS for a plex media server storage array over something like Mergerfs/Snapraid. I use the latter for my 200+TB media array and it's wonderful. 22 data disks. 2 parity disks (can use up to 6). Non striped means even if you lose more drives than you have parity for, you only lose the data on those bad drives. Performance wise, there is no need for a striped array to handle a massive media streaming load.
While I don’t have an issue with manually configuring MergerFS + SnapRAID, and run a few smaller testing setups, there is value in having a dashboard just to quickly look at everything. If there was a decent solution that had a dashboard I might get on board.
Have you updated your old build threads? I don’t recall any mentions of your 200 TB NAS. I’d love to learn more details of what you did, like how you shared about your other boxen.