Any advice on my plans?

[deanhuff]

I'm new to FreeNAS. I've been around RedHat Enterprise Linux for quite a while at work. I've been able to find my way around FreeBSD with out too much headache so far.

My goals of my NAS are to have network storage for 2 mac minis, 2 apple laptops, supply plex to several TVs & iOS devices. I plan to symlink ~/Music & ~/Pictures to a network share for NAS hosted iTunes and iPhoto. I also plan to make a timemachine capable volume

My plan it to make a fraken FreeNAS that intentionally breaks some of the great advise that I've read about on the forum and over time make some upgrades to bring the machine inline with recommended best practices.

I've got a Dell Inspiron 660
Intel i5 3GHz)
8 gigs (DDR3 NON-ECC) memory
Onboard Realtek gigabit ethernet
Some kind of sata card
2x 3TB WD green drives (going to mod the 8sec park time to 300sec)
2x 3TB Seagate drives
2x 4TB Seagate drives

I believe this setup will give me about 9TB of space with no data loss with up to 3 disks failing.

My initial plan is to create 1 ZPOOL with 1 6 disk VDEV in RAID-Z3. I know that I'll be underutilizing my 4TB drives in the RAID-Z3 (but that's all I have at the moment).

One of my goals is to have flexibility to upgrade to all 4TB drives in the future if I ever need more space. (I believe I could get up to 12TB using this same VDEV)

I plan to swap out the MOBO for something that supports ECC and has an onboard INTEL nic sometime in the future. I also will put 32GB of ram ECC in it.

For backups I've got 2 additional 4tB USB drives. One drive is constantly hooked up to a mini. That mini along with its drives are backed up to BackBLAZE (online backup). I plan to make one of the USB drives nightly RSYNC from the NAS to have a recent picture. The other drive I will sit on the shelf and I'll back it up manually every once in a while.

Anything sound absolutely crazy?

Should I bite the bullet and get the ECC capable MOBO & ram now just to be safe?

See any issues with my Drive configuration or would you set your VDEV up differently?

thanks
-Dean

 

[gpsguy]

I'd recommend doing it right - from the get go.

Six disks is an optimal number for RAIDz2. 7 disks would be a better choice for RAIDz3.

Should I bite the bullet and get the ECC capable MOBO & ram now just to be safe?

 

[deanhuff]

My hardware order is on its way.

Corsair CS450M 80+ GOLD
CASE CORSAIR| 550D RTL ( 1)
CASE FAN CORSAIR| CO-9050009-WW R ( 1)
ADD CARD ROSEWILL PCI-USB RC-101 R ( 1)
CPU INTEL|XEON E3 1230V2 3.3G HT R
SERVER_MB SUPERMICRO|MBD-X9SCA-F-O ( 1)
MEM 8Gx2|CRUCIAL CT2KIT102472BD160B ( 1)

I'm sticking with the mis-mash of drives for now....ultimetly i'd like to get the seagates out of the equation. What's the de-facto drive manufacturer in the 3-4TB range? I'm guessing WD...I've read from my BackBlaze customer emails that they have had great success with Hitachi's (which i guess i now toshiba?)

backblaze article: http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

Here's to hoping the build goes well....

 

[deanhuff]

The server is built...the FreeNAS now has more horse power than any other machine in the house :)

Can someone point me to a thread with some performance testing advice?

Large file throughput is 90 - 110MB/sec (according to OSX Activity Monitor) which is plenty fast for anything I'll be doing.

Small files (and directory scans with lots of files) are slower than i'd like them to be. Specifically, browsing to my Music folder with ~700 directories (which then contain a bunch of dirs) seems to take a lot of time ~20 seconds the first time through.