Hello FreeNAS Gurus! My name is Dan, I'm an avid IT enthusiast and network engineer, currently pursuing my Masters of Computer Science. I’ve been reading through the forums for months, this is my first time posting! There’s quite a plethora of information to read and digest. I’ve been trying to be a big boy and figure out my build all by myself, but I still have concerns and would really benefit and appreciate any suggestions or validations you can offer me. I’m sorry ahead of time for the length of this post… but appreciate your feed back!
First, some background on my objective and use-case.. From what I’ve been reading, this does not seem to be the typical home usage.. but I feel like FreeNAS is still the right solution for me. People always seem to specify that a RAID is not a BACKUP.. So, if after you read through this, if you have any recommendations on what does equate to a good backup, I’m really interested in knowing! Now, here are my 3 reasons for this build.
Business Purposes:
I have 4 family businesses, at separate locations (all in NJ, USA). Their total combined business data is under 200GB and consists of Word documents, some images and audio files and some quickbooks, access databases, and other basic office documents. At each office location, I have a primary machine that stores all the data and shares out folders to the other office machines for data access. I would like to maintain a copy of all their data within FreeNAS with a snapshot or three for rollbacks and data recovery from user error. In addition, I want to perform Windows Backups for all computers at each location; this is not a function currently implemented, only business data is backed up.
Extended Family Purposes:
Along with the duties of being the family IT guy, I’ve now been dubbed as the precious family memories curator.. Family members will be given a set of instructions to send family related content to me, I will then organize and maintain it within FreeNAS and plan to use Plex or OwnCloud to give family and friends access to this content via the web. I don’t think this will extend beyond 4TB any time soon.. but, who knows!
Personal Purposes:
I have 5 users in my house, with several networked devices, whom I’d like to be able to stream via Plex. I also have the most data, currently around 6TB, that I would like to maintain on the FreeNAS as well; this is music, movies, raw video footage and photos and thousands of ebooks and pdfs. I’m curious about Plex, OwnCloud, Sickbeard, Couch Potato and some of the other plugins; are they worth running on my FreeNAS or should I run them on my desktop and migrate data from there?
Here are my main questions & concerns.
Disk Size:
I envision this unit someday holding 20TB of data (likely mirrored, so 40TB of drives, but this number is really high… might never actually exceed 16TB) I’m not sure if there’s any dangers using larger drives, aside from longer rebuild times. I was thinking 4TB drives seem to be a mid point between capacity and resilvering time. Is it safe to just use 6TB drives or larger to maximize storage capacity within a single large case? Is the resilvering process substantially longer between 2, 4 and 6TB drives? To the point where it warrants buying 1 size over another?
RAID1 Vs. RAID10 Vs. ZFS2.. (I’m pretty sure that’s the title of at least 2 articles I’ve read)
I’ve spent hours and hours reading through RAID posts and trying to understand the benefits and caveats of each..The dreaded Raid5 write hole lead me to ZFS2, which seems wonderful! Except for how slow the resilvering process can be, and the potential for data loss during that time. I am currently of the mindset that RAID1 arrays are the best way to go, for me, as they offer normal write speeds (I’ll be doing bulk writes, but then small incremental writes as new data is created at each location, so I figure internet bandwidth will be a bigger bottleneck than disk write speeds), better than single disk read speeds, and seemingly much quicker resilvering times in the event of a failure. I would have a Raid1 for Business, Extended Family, and Personal (so 3 groups of 2 disks to start) and feel that simply adding 2 more disks as an additional Raid1 would make expansion much easier than trying to extend a ZFS2 array. Does my logic here make any sense? Most of what I’ve read seems to show users implementing ZFS2. The big downside I see to my method, is as “Personal” grows beyond the size of the Raid1 to a second Raid mirror, they will show up as 2 different volumes and I’ll have to either split my data up accordingly or just know to check both folders. My concern is, if a drive fails in a portion of my “Personal” data, I would prefer to have half the data still available, and just have to rebuild that disk. I would also like to remain somewhat system agnostic; in the event of any weird hardware or software failures, I’d like to be able to pull out my drives and pop them in another machine (possibly FreeNAS, possibly Windows)
Requirements (with more questions)
Will the following hardware, in combination with my Raid1 vs RaidZ2 choice, successfully meet these requirements I’ve outlined above?
Case: $100 Fractal Define 4
Motherboard: $250 X10SL7-F
CPU: $270 LGA 1150 Intel Xeon E3-1230V3 Haswell
Ram: $250 (2x) Crucial 16GB Kit (PC3-12800) DR x8 ECC UDIMM Server Memory CT2KIT102472BD160B/CT2CP102472BD160B
PSU: $60 SeaSonic G550 80+ Gold (Is this enough to power a potential 10-12 HDDs?)
Hard Drives: (qty:x) 4TB WD Red NAS WD40EFRX
Total Cost (Minus Drives) ~ $930
Thank you in advance for taking the time to read this and any feedback you can provide me!
Cheers,
Danno
(Sincerely, anyone who took the time to read ALL of this, I really do appreciate it!)
First, some background on my objective and use-case.. From what I’ve been reading, this does not seem to be the typical home usage.. but I feel like FreeNAS is still the right solution for me. People always seem to specify that a RAID is not a BACKUP.. So, if after you read through this, if you have any recommendations on what does equate to a good backup, I’m really interested in knowing! Now, here are my 3 reasons for this build.
Business Purposes:
I have 4 family businesses, at separate locations (all in NJ, USA). Their total combined business data is under 200GB and consists of Word documents, some images and audio files and some quickbooks, access databases, and other basic office documents. At each office location, I have a primary machine that stores all the data and shares out folders to the other office machines for data access. I would like to maintain a copy of all their data within FreeNAS with a snapshot or three for rollbacks and data recovery from user error. In addition, I want to perform Windows Backups for all computers at each location; this is not a function currently implemented, only business data is backed up.
Extended Family Purposes:
Along with the duties of being the family IT guy, I’ve now been dubbed as the precious family memories curator.. Family members will be given a set of instructions to send family related content to me, I will then organize and maintain it within FreeNAS and plan to use Plex or OwnCloud to give family and friends access to this content via the web. I don’t think this will extend beyond 4TB any time soon.. but, who knows!
Personal Purposes:
I have 5 users in my house, with several networked devices, whom I’d like to be able to stream via Plex. I also have the most data, currently around 6TB, that I would like to maintain on the FreeNAS as well; this is music, movies, raw video footage and photos and thousands of ebooks and pdfs. I’m curious about Plex, OwnCloud, Sickbeard, Couch Potato and some of the other plugins; are they worth running on my FreeNAS or should I run them on my desktop and migrate data from there?
Here are my main questions & concerns.
Disk Size:
I envision this unit someday holding 20TB of data (likely mirrored, so 40TB of drives, but this number is really high… might never actually exceed 16TB) I’m not sure if there’s any dangers using larger drives, aside from longer rebuild times. I was thinking 4TB drives seem to be a mid point between capacity and resilvering time. Is it safe to just use 6TB drives or larger to maximize storage capacity within a single large case? Is the resilvering process substantially longer between 2, 4 and 6TB drives? To the point where it warrants buying 1 size over another?
RAID1 Vs. RAID10 Vs. ZFS2.. (I’m pretty sure that’s the title of at least 2 articles I’ve read)
I’ve spent hours and hours reading through RAID posts and trying to understand the benefits and caveats of each..The dreaded Raid5 write hole lead me to ZFS2, which seems wonderful! Except for how slow the resilvering process can be, and the potential for data loss during that time. I am currently of the mindset that RAID1 arrays are the best way to go, for me, as they offer normal write speeds (I’ll be doing bulk writes, but then small incremental writes as new data is created at each location, so I figure internet bandwidth will be a bigger bottleneck than disk write speeds), better than single disk read speeds, and seemingly much quicker resilvering times in the event of a failure. I would have a Raid1 for Business, Extended Family, and Personal (so 3 groups of 2 disks to start) and feel that simply adding 2 more disks as an additional Raid1 would make expansion much easier than trying to extend a ZFS2 array. Does my logic here make any sense? Most of what I’ve read seems to show users implementing ZFS2. The big downside I see to my method, is as “Personal” grows beyond the size of the Raid1 to a second Raid mirror, they will show up as 2 different volumes and I’ll have to either split my data up accordingly or just know to check both folders. My concern is, if a drive fails in a portion of my “Personal” data, I would prefer to have half the data still available, and just have to rebuild that disk. I would also like to remain somewhat system agnostic; in the event of any weird hardware or software failures, I’d like to be able to pull out my drives and pop them in another machine (possibly FreeNAS, possibly Windows)
Requirements (with more questions)
- On & Off-site weekly (or every 2 weeks) backup of Windows machines to FreeNAS
- Done over-night and throttled speeds
- incremental, I hope..
- 12 machines, can be scheduled for various days and times to minimize bandwidth consumption
- ~ 3TB of storage needed
- On & Off-site access to data (streaming movies, music, 1080p videos & Windows & Mac file shares)
- Ability to support at least 5 1080P streams simultaneously on and off-site (I’ve got a 50MB down 25MB up service at the moment, which may be a bottleneck) Most streaming will be done on-site (connected via Gigabit switch)
- Ability to support at least 5 1080P streams simultaneously on and off-site (I’ve got a 50MB down 25MB up service at the moment, which may be a bottleneck) Most streaming will be done on-site (connected via Gigabit switch)
- On & Off-site access to data via network shared folders.
- 95% Windows 5% Mac..
- 95% Windows 5% Mac..
- Disk Size & Type - My heart says 4TB, my brain says 6TB..
- Seems WD Reds are the best way to go.. but what about the HGST Deskstar NAS drives?
- Is there a significant resilvering time between 2TB, 4TB & 6TB drives?
- What do you guys personally use and feel safe with?
- Backup - extra piece of mind.. This device will be used to maintain backups of data, but I would like to make a backup of the backup.. Well.. two actually. I would like to have the whole system backed up. My initial thought was a second identical FreeNAS box at the most heavy use family business and RSYNC the two together. I am now thinking about using Crashplan Central (or any other cloud service based on your suggestions) instead. In addition, I would like to maintain a set of physical drives offline. A friend of mine does this process by simply removing a drive from his mirror, and letting it rebuild. The removed drive then becomes an offline backup; this process would be done weekly or every other week, but seems very intensive on the disks.. is there a better approach to do this is an incremental way that doesn’t require resilvering every time??
- Disaster Recovery - Here’s my fall back plan..
- End-user system dies, I can restore from backup (remotely would be lovely, but I’ll likely hop in the car with an external drive with the image from the FreeNAS)
- 1 drive in a mirror fails, resilver mirror
- both drives in a given mirror fail, resilver from off-site, non cloud, backup
- FreeNAS explodes (or is stolen/fire/flood) (and non cloud backup also fails), restore from cloud service.
- Raid
- ZFS2 pool of disks or several Raid1 Mirrors?
- raid1 seems easier and quicker to repair
- how can I mirror this FreeNAS to a set of offline disks?
- break raid and resilver, creating a backup of the data from that time to be maintained offline, and eventually cycled back into the raid the next time a offline backup is done.
- ZFS2 pool of disks or several Raid1 Mirrors?
Will the following hardware, in combination with my Raid1 vs RaidZ2 choice, successfully meet these requirements I’ve outlined above?
Case: $100 Fractal Define 4
Motherboard: $250 X10SL7-F
CPU: $270 LGA 1150 Intel Xeon E3-1230V3 Haswell
Ram: $250 (2x) Crucial 16GB Kit (PC3-12800) DR x8 ECC UDIMM Server Memory CT2KIT102472BD160B/CT2CP102472BD160B
PSU: $60 SeaSonic G550 80+ Gold (Is this enough to power a potential 10-12 HDDs?)
Hard Drives: (qty:x) 4TB WD Red NAS WD40EFRX
Total Cost (Minus Drives) ~ $930
Thank you in advance for taking the time to read this and any feedback you can provide me!
Cheers,
Danno
(Sincerely, anyone who took the time to read ALL of this, I really do appreciate it!)