Are NAS drives always required?

[linus12]

OK. Before everyone goes crazy with the obvious... My FreeNAS box will be hosting three different kinds of usage:

1. Shared and personal storage for all users currently located at home.
2. My entire Movie Collection ripped from my personal BluRay and DVD discs that I still have.
3. Backups from various small computers (laptops, etc.) that I don't want to have to shuffle around an external drive to.

Each of these will be in separate pools. sets of drives
For #1, the plan is NAS drives in Raid 5
For #2, I was planning on Raid 1(mirrored drives) (if one goes down, rebuild from the other. if both go down I can restore from backups, or rerip)
For #3, no Raid (Backups will be copied offsite on a "regular" basis, so in a sense this is a temporary storage.

Now the backups probably won't be accessed as much as you think, I have automatic backups setup weekly for my PC, but most are pretty small. The rest only backup after constant nagging; and yes, I've had to rebuild and recover a few of them a few times, which earns a grateful "Thank you, Dear" or "Thank you, Daddy", but again, the actual data needing to be recovered was less than a gigabyte each time. Eventually I will be setting the rest on up on regular backups, but on the other hand most are on the verge of moving out! My thought is that by using just regular large drives, I can encourage them to do more regular backups and then get them offsite in larger amounts rather than onesy-twosy.

So that leaves us with the Movie disks. I seem to be the only one that will be watching these on a regular basis, and while I do like to watch them, they won't be in use 24/7. Probably closer to 6 hours over 5 days each week. My assumption is that they can power down and park as needed, similar to the drives in my PC where they are currently stored and accessed.

So the question is really: Do I need the more expensive NAS drives for those movie pools? Or can a few good, quality, desktop drives be substituted; at least until funds become available to flush out the whole server?

Edit: replaced use of the word pools since I think it was used incorrectly with regards to the ZDF file system.

 

[Evertb1]

You can run non NAS drives. FreeNAS won't mind. You also can run FreeNAS on consumer hardware with non ECC memory. It will work. But you must have had reasons to go with FreeNAS. Why FreeNAS, while there are -less demanding- alternatives? Is the reason that FreeNAS has some nice features that helps you to protect your data? If so, you will benefit the most of those features with the right hardware. And keep in mind that cheaper desktop drives are not necessary the most economic choise. The lifespan of a NAS harddrive is to be expected better then a desktop drive on a NAS application. Is the extra money worth it? If that movie pool is not that important maybe not. At the end you are the one to decide.

Besides my own FreeNAS servers I am also maintaining some Synology NAS boxes for my family. I encountered this article on the Synology site. It speaks for itself.

 

[linus12]

You can run non NAS drives. FreeNAS won't mind. You also can run FreeNAS on consumer hardware with non ECC memory. It will work. But you must have had reasons to go with FreeNAS. Why FreeNAS, while there are -less demanding- alternatives? Is the reason that FreeNAS has some nice features that helps you to protect your data? If so, you will benefit the most of those features with the right hardware. And keep in mind that cheaper desktop drives are not necessary the most economic choise. The lifespan of a NAS harddrive is to be expected better then a desktop drive on a NAS application. Is the extra money worth it? If that movie pool is not that important maybe not. At the end you are the one to decide.

Besides my own FreeNAS servers I am also maintaining some Synology NAS boxes for my family. I encountered this article on the Synology site. It speaks for itself.

Appreciate the response. Yes, I do understand the demand differences between a Server and PC, but then my PC has been running a virtual server on it for the last 6 years 24/7... and while there are scheduled jobs and scripts that run "most of the time", the demand on the drives is actually minimal.

For the most part it's the massive amount of data that I don't like on my on personal computer. Keeping it there is a pain when I upgrade software and hardware, not to mention if a new piece of software decides to look through all non-networked drives to "catalog files" and of course the duplicate files across multiple PCs! So for those files/pools I will definately be using the NAS drives.

Unfortunately my movie collection is approaching 10TB in size. That is why I was thinking of using 4x10TB or 2x12TB drives, probably Seagate Barracudas because I've had good luck with them in the past. These will be basically write once read many, with additional writes only has I obtain new disks.

As I said, the Server has three main purposes and this is just one. And that's why I value All input.

 

[Heracles]

Hey Linus12,

In your description, you used pools for doing what should be done by datasets... From what you described, you plan for 2 redundant drives, 2 pools with one each and a third pool without any.

You would be a million time better to do a single Raid-Z2 pool :
--You will have the same 2 redundant drives
--These 2 drives will protect all of your data and not just part of it
--Should one goes down, the pool is safe and re-silver is protected against error anywhere else in the pool
--The storage will be offered to every need (you can always cap datasets to whatever limit you wish)

Clearly, a single Raid-Z2 would be much safer and much more flexible.

 

[LVLouisCyphre]

Drives are no where near as big of an issue as ECC memory IMO. S.M.A.R.T. will find drive faults before they're the issue as long as your drives support S.M.A.R.T. and you properly monitor your drives. Desktop S.M.A.R.T. drives should work for your needs. I have no reservations if I had to run a RAID of S.M.A.R.T. desktop drives with FreeNAS.

 

[linus12]

I have edited my original post to remove the word pools, as the way I was using them was not consistent with FreeNAS.

I was trying to indicate that "like" data was kept together on specific drives as a way to build out the system slowly.

My first priority is to move the "movies" off of my personal drive and onto the server, making them available for everyone. Again, I have the originals so if I were to lose both drives, I could still recover. (Though this may end up being 2 drives mirrored onto 2 additional drives depending on the prices of the individual drives. This is where I was thinking of starting with Desktop drives. Also these drives will not be accessed as much or as often, and will mostly be read-only type operations. Since we are talking about an initial 10TB of required storage, this can add up pretty fast just for the "movies".
--Note: I will be purchasing new drives for the server, my existing movie collection is spread out over 4 drives on two systems.

Second priority is to create a few "personal drive shares" for each of our household so that they can access their personal files from various devices and not have to have multiple copies. These would be accessible only to them, not to everyone. These drives will probably have most of the Read/Write transactions and "may" contain a few small databases for personal use. These will definately be NAS drives and setup in Raid-2. Not for backup but for protection against disk failure.
Along with that "personal drive share" there as been a request for a "family drive share" to constantly put photos, music, and other files to share between all "family" members. Based on the request, this would the same as one of the "personal drive shares" just with more users having access and would be on the same drives as the "Personal drive shares".

Third priority is the "backup" area to consolidate the backups of the small devices prior to them being stored off for offsite storage.

While money is not a big criteria, it does play a part. I know that drives need to be replaced, but I also know I have to get the server running before anyone else will see a benefit. So... if I were to go with Desktop Drives, I know that any replacements will probably be NAS drives of comparable size and speed.

All told, I expect the final system will have (if drives were empty) somewhere in the neighborhood of 40-60 TB available for storage, yet the bandwidth would probably miniscule compared what most of you are all doing. Yes, I could have gone with a commercial system, but I do like to build, tinker, and monitor my systems; which is why I chose FreeNAS.

 

[G8One2]

NAS drives are recommended becasue they are meant to be used in that way. Standard desktop drives, or green drives will wear out faster becuase the head will park itself after a set amount of time. Being in a NAS system, they will constantly park and un park the heads for read /writes. NAS systems typically always have some sort of disk activity. So keep in mind, using regular drives, will wear out much faster compared to drives meant for NAS or datacenters. Its not that you cant use regualar drives, they will work but your going to lose longevity with standard drives and will need to replace them more often than that of NAS drives. Also make sure you have scheduled SMART short and long test and regular system scrubs.

 

[Alecmascot]

they will constantly park and un park the heads for read /writes.

Not if you run wdidle and disable that function

 

[G8One2]

That's hit or miss. It works on some drives, not all of them. In fact I have 3 of the WD blue drives that didn't work on. Even after using wdidle the load cycle count was in the thousands. Of the 8 I purchased, 3 of them eventually had to be replaced after about a year. So I now just buy the Red drives to avoid the hassle of warranty returning drives. Not only that, when you have large pools with multiple vdevs, I'd rather not take the chance of a few drives failing because wdidle didn't work. It also sucks to have to keep up with warranty returns with 18+ drives.

 

[Alecmascot]

If one is running a FN server for home use then things are very different.
I have WD greens with 80K hours and over 1M Load Cycle Counts (before I stopped that) and they are fine.
If you are responsible for an enterprise setup then you should run proper enterprise quality drives. The WD Reds (5400) fall between those two applications.

 

[G8One2]

And your point is what? I was simply making a statement about using NAS drives vs regular desktop drives. Not that you couldn't or shouldnt use them.

 

[Stilez]

You can use any drives you like. Unlike ECC, the drives are expected to fail (eventually) and the system takes their failure in it's stride. The issue is therefore different - when designing a basic home FreeNAS setup, you choose your main pool setup (as oppposed to.caching setup: ZIL/SLOG and optional L2ARC) with two goals

- Enough redundancy that if disks fail, you're pretty sure not so.many will fail that you lose your pool. (You can always add more disks to increase redundancy to an acceptable.level)
- High enough quality disks and appropriate pool.layout to get the data speed you need

So for example, you might trust a 2 way mirror of enterprise disks, but decide to use a 3 way mirror of old dirt cheap.consumer disks. The consumer disks are slower and more error prone, and may die sooner, but you perhaps figure that write speed isn't that big a deal (mirrors write at the slowest disk speed), and a 3 way mirror of lesser disk quality is that bit faster read speed (mirrors can read from each disk simultaneously), and as acceptably error.tolerant as a 2 way mirror of higher quality disks. Why might you do this? Perhaps you can get the consumer disks so cheaply, or already have them at home from an old.machine. Many reasons.

In other words, unlike ECC, you can design your disk pool to.take disk quality into.account. Just know what you need, and the consequences of your choices.