Advice before setting up please

[Grenik]

My storage is a mess, and that is why I am going to try and set up a FreeNAS for my home use. I am getting an AMD Athlon II X2 260 Regor 3.2GHz, MSI 970A-G46 Motherboard, 16 BG RAM, and 4x2TB SATA drives. I have three computers, two of them with external 4x2TB SanDigital eSATA RAID "boxes" running in RAID 5. I also have an assortment of external HD's (but ignore them, I will not use them for NAS). I try to share the storage over my 1 Gig network, but a computer will be off or something and it is just a pain. What I ended up with is a lot of partitions, some with data overflowing, many with a lot of wasted space, multiple versions of documents, different people's files spread all over the place, and just a big mess. It is difficult for me to backup data to a remote storage location for example.

So, I have 12 commercial quality 2TB internal SATA drives, 8 are in use, 4 will be new. I have been reading everything I can find here for a couple days and the PowerPoint presentation that someone posted was great for getting it all straight (well, straighter). But, I could really use some help as to how to get the best use out of these drives. My original plan was to put the four new ones into the new FreeNAS system in RAIDZ1, move data from one of my SansDigital boxes to the NAS. Reuse the now empty drives in the NAS. Do the same thing with the other SansDigital box.

I end up with 3 VDevs at 4x2TB RAIDZ1 since once I set up the VDev I cannot add a drive to it? I guess they could all be in the same zpool or separate zpools and I am not sure what is better. But, I do not really need 18 TB of storage if it was well managed and well laid out. Probably 10 TB or even less would do it.

1) Is there a better way to use these 12 drives?

Also, this is for home file use. A lot of music, movies, scanned receipts, documents, pictures, etc. How do I allocate my large amount of storage so that my financial information for example is not out with the music? I have some data that I encrypt with TrueCrypt so that you cannot even mount it without the password and knowing where it is. Can I do that with FreeNAS? I see that partitions are not used, but that one of the features is thin provisioning which implies (to me) that I can over allocate space and then change it as I go?

2) How do I allocate space for organization (like partitions did) and will I be able to change the allocation as they fill up? Is there a good strategy here that I should be using?

3) Just a curiosity question, if I have multiple ZDevs in one zPool, when I send a file to it, will that entire file be in one Zdev, or could it be spread across both? Do I care?

The information on the forums has been excellent, thank you to everyone contributing. It saved me from shelling out a lot of $$$ for an off the shelve NAS. I have build several desktop machines and it never dawned on me to build a NAS.

Thank you in advance.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

1) if you want more redundancy you can setup mirrors, instead of a bunch of vdevs. that would give you more redundancy and less cpu usage (minimal).
2) basically datasets are like partitions, they live ontop of your zpool and can allocate up 100% of the space of your zpool each. a dataset can be compressed, snapshoted, have certain permissions, have atime enabled/disabled. they can even have encryption but I believe you could only do that on freenas8.3 and it' not supported in the gui yet. for now you could just encrypt a file in a dataset.
3) you shouldn't care, zfs will spread the data as evenly as it can across the vdevs, you get the most out of your hardware when vdevs match in performance though. the downside is if any vdevs fail, everything is gone.

if you only need 10TB you could go with a super reliable setup. 2 x raidz2's of 6 drives each. that would give you 16TB of space. you could also play around with mirrors though I don't know what would be best. I really like raidz2's cause they allow you to have 2 extra copies of files incase one gets corrupted, that way zfs has a better chance of fixing errors during it's scrubs.

 

[Stephens]

1)I really like raidz2's cause they allow you to have 2 extra copies of files incase one gets corrupted, that way zfs has a better chance of fixing errors during it's scrubs.

RAIDZ2 doesn't have 2 copies of files. It has the equivalent of 2 disks of parity information which can be used to recreate files in case of up to two lost disks.

 

[Grenik]

Thank you for the advice, I had not throught about a 6 drive solution.

Does it matter if I make one 6 drive RAIDZ2, copy my data to it, and then make a second 6 drive Z2 and add it to the pool vs. making the two vdevs at the same time? Will the data I already have on the first vdev be spread accross the second one when I make it, or will new data just be moved to the two?

In the first case, I could not make the equivilant of a RAID 60 but in the second case, I could?

Thank you for the advice.

 

[Stephens]

Unless something changed in 8.3, FreeNAS doesn't auto-level, so if you fill up vdev1 in zpool1, then add vdev2, new data will be spread amongst both vdevs, but old data won't be. I know there was talk here of this "auto-leveling" feature, but I don't remember the details. It may require a new version of ZFS (not yet implemented into FreeNAS) or may require a new version of FreeNAS.

 

[ben]

Old data will not be re-distributed across newly added vdevs, but new blocks will be written mostly to the new one (whether part of new or old files) until the utilization is closer to even. If they're files that change a lot, it will be pretty even fairly soon, if not they'll remain poorly distributed for a while.