Now that I’m relatively happy with the network transfer speeds (would be nice if I had a 10Gb LAN; that’s cost prohibitive for now) and I think I’m able to nearly fully saturating the network with file transfers.
The next step is to figure out how the network shares should be set up/accessed. I don’t want another malware going rampant on my network and encrypting files again.
First thought was to make all network shares read only, with the exception of the user data share. The media and other long term storage doesn’t really need r/w access. I can manage those from a separate r/w share, but for every other user, they would get only read.

The user data folder is another story. The user stores their sensitive data here, and having it deleted or messed around with would be crappy. Not the end of the world, as I have a Crashplan service that backup all the user data and can be recovered at any time (even deleted files) but it’s a hassle to get to, slow to re-download the data so I am leaving this as a worse case/house burns down scenario. I’d like to have a better option to recover erased/messed up data in my house.

The ZFS feature of snapshots is fantastic. I’ve used it, and it came in handy on a few occasions. Since I’ve consolidated all the storage on one system (UnRAID) and moved away from FreeNAS, i’d like to find a way to get a similar job done in some way.

Just built a new unRaid setup (which is running as a VM indide ESXi 6.0.0)
Currently have 3 x 2TB drives in the array with no parity drive. This yields 6TB of storage.
Writing to a user share (no cache disk) yields some pretty great access speeds. The array is empty at this point, with no data on it yet, and there was no parity drive installed.
The unRaid machine was near by the windows box from where I ran this test. maybe 6ft of ethernet from windows machine to switch, and another 6ft cable to the unraid box
After transferring 4.7TB of data to the array, I did another speed test. This time there is still no parity drive, but I’m running the test from a bit further away at maybe 30-40ft of cable. Still pretty good speeds.

Doing a parity check (since I just installed a parity drive) is giving me speeds of 120MB/sec (at the beginning of the check). This is very likely close to the max speed of the drives.

Parity check is finished, and ran another speed test to see how the read/write speeds to the array have changed. The differences are smaller then I expected.
Once I get a windows VM running on the same ESXi server, I will do another test to see how much of an effect the network has on these read/write speeds, but I don’t think the network is limiting me.
I am quite happy with these numbers as the old unRaid box was putting out in the order of 30-40MB/s (about 1/2 of the new speeds).

UPDATE: (29 Dec 2015)

Have been using the unraid NAS for over 2 weeks and I just did another speed test. The server has been in good use since and it’s running at round 70% capacity right now.
The speeds are better then before. I added a couple of 32 GB SSD drives I had laying around as cache drives (in raid1 for redundancy). They should take care of slow write speeds.

The more I use UnRaid, and the more I read about it the more I like it.
I do however miss the snapshotting feature of ZFS. I will have to figure out a way to get similar functionality as it’s nice to have access to changed or deleted files after the fact.