A few questions about RAID and FreeNAS

[Will Sanderson]

Hi All,

FreeNAS beginner and first post in the forum.

Currently running version 9.2.1 (I think) on a HP N54L microserver. OS is installed on a 250Gb HDD and I have two WD Red's (2x3Tb) in RAID 1 using the FreeNAS software. I recently started talking to a friend about swapping and adding drives etc to his QNAP device but wondered what is available in FreeNAS:

1. If I wanted to add another WDD 3Tb drive to my existing RAID 1 setup could I do this without jeopardising the current volume?

2. In the event one of my drives fails, is it possible to add another drive an copy everything from one to set up a new RAID 1? Or would I have to copy all the data off the remaining drive onto a new RAID 1 set up? Is there another way of doing it...?

Apologies if these questions have already been asked but I did look to see if a post existed and couldnt find any thing.

Regards,

Will

 

[HoneyBadger]

Hi Will,

For your first question, your existing drives are mirroring each other. You can add a third drive, but it would simply be a copy of the other two, to create a three-way mirror. What you don't want to do is add the single drive into the collection, because then you'd have something that would divide the data across the mirror and the single drive - meaning losing that single drive costs you the entire pool of disks.

I'd suggest Cyberjock's newbie guide, as it will explain some of the differences between how RAID handles disks ("arrays" or "virtual drives") and how ZFS groups them ("vdev" and "zpool")
http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

For your second question, if one drive fails, you would replace the failed drive with one of identical (or greater) size, and then tell FreeNAS to repair the broken vdev (mirror) - it would automatically copy the data from the good drive back.

Cheers!

 

[david kennedy]

Slightly off topic, but install freenas on a USB stick.

It has a few advantages:
- Less power consumed
- free up a sata port
- no wasted space (freenas partitioned your disk in like 8gb and the rest is unusable).
- Often cheaper but i suspect you had the drive lying around.

 

[Will Sanderson]

David

I know I should have, I did originally...but it was a 250Gb drive that came with the micro server so I had no other use for it. Plus I am only using 2 bays at the minute so I still have 2 sata ports left :)!

Honey Badger (great name by the way.. the most fearsome beast (View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg
)

Does the repair function work irrespective of which volume manager you used? (ZFS vs UFS)

Thanks,

 

[HoneyBadger]

Yes, FreeNAS can perform a failed disk replacement on either one from the GUI.

 

[gpsguy]

If you want to add additional drives, first of all, I'd replace the 250Gb boot drive with a flash drive (recommended installation).

Backup your configuration file, install the same version of FreeNAS onto a 4Gb flash drive, and restore your configuration. If you want to mount the flash drive inside the box, there's a spot for it, just inside the door on the left hand side.

With 2 bays free, add another mirrored pair of drives. You can either extend your current volume or create another volume with the pair of new drives.

How much RAM did you put in your Microserver? One can put 16Gb ECC RAM in it.

 

[cyberjock]

Regarding that video.. if you look under Honeybadger's name you'll see it says "Mushroom! Mushroom!". I did that as a joke because of this video...


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI