So I recently purchased a 4U Storinator 45drives system, which comes with:
I currently have an 8x12tb drive raidz2 freenas build with an Intel NVME SLOG in a PCIe slot, but it's getting full and I wanted to expand, and my current motherboard doesn't have any free PCIe slots. My use cases are:
- LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i (Connecting 40 Drives using 2 Expanders)
- LSI MegaRAID SAS 9211-4i (Connecting 4 Drives in JBOD mode)
- LSI MegaRAID SAS 9285CV-8e
- 2x Intel RES2SV240 24-port SAS2
- 44 4TB drives of unknown quality
- 128GB of DDR4 2133 MHz ECC RAM
- Dual Xeon 2673 V3 (total of 24 cores/48 threads)
I currently have an 8x12tb drive raidz2 freenas build with an Intel NVME SLOG in a PCIe slot, but it's getting full and I wanted to expand, and my current motherboard doesn't have any free PCIe slots. My use cases are:
- VM disk images over iscsi 10gbit
- Media (movies, tv shows, pictures, music)
- Backups for my various computers and VMs (use case for dedupe?)
- I've heard expanders are bad (although isn't that essentially what a backplane is?), hence why I bought the 40 channel HBA.
- Which of these SAS cards can be flashed into IT mode?
- If I have a mix of HDDs and SSDs, would it matter which card I use for which purpose?
- I've read a little about Fusion Pools, where you can store your metadata on a separate vdev. Does anyone have experience with this? Is it recommended?
- Is Scale ready for prime time or does it need a few more years to work out all the bugs? My current system runs Core 12, I see 13 is available but I have to switch trains, and 13 is now "Community Release Only" and "Not Enterprise Supported".
- This would let me move (some of) my VMs into truenas directly... should I?
- And finally disk/vdev layout. I think I just want two data pools (ssd and hdd), would it be "best" to keep adding 8 drive raidz2's? is there another layout that's more optimal? And for the SSD pool I've heard that striped mirrors is the way to go for iops, so I'm learning towards this.
- What SSDs? I've been fond of the Samsung 860/870 EVO/PRO 2.5" drives, but I haven't really shopped around for a while now.
- I'm still undecided on how many (if any) of the 4TB drives I'll be using vs selling, but I plan on putting the VM disks on the SSD pool (and probably any Scale apps, assuming I go with Scale)
- Are there other things I should put here? Like should this be the system dataset (which iirc just holds RRD data)? What about as the metadata vdev? Or should that be separate?
Last edited: