I ran 5 external USB + SMR hard disks in RAIDZ 5 for 10 years. The only thing I had to change was to use Highpoint's enterprise level USB controllers- commercial USB controllers from Realtek and Renasus are junk and will drop the drives after a while.
Even then, I had multiple cases where files were corrupted, and once the whole array refused to be online due to corrupted metadata. I had to make ZFS to replay the journal log with undocumented commands. Sometimes it takes a few days of hair-rising recovery but I always manage to get the array back intact.
The files that are corrupted are always extremely large files (>50 GB) with many small read/writes (eg. iSCSI image files.)
It's pretty impressive how resilient ZFS is, really, given I had what likely to be the worst possible hardware combination.
Even then, I had multiple cases where files were corrupted, and once the whole array refused to be online due to corrupted metadata. I had to make ZFS to replay the journal log with undocumented commands. Sometimes it takes a few days of hair-rising recovery but I always manage to get the array back intact.
The files that are corrupted are always extremely large files (>50 GB) with many small read/writes (eg. iSCSI image files.)
It's pretty impressive how resilient ZFS is, really, given I had what likely to be the worst possible hardware combination.