Basic 'shared drive'

[recall9]

Looking to setup a simple to use automounted shared drive across various machines running windows7, window81, windows10 and latest lts ubuntu

Want reliability but no need for drive level encryption.

Specs I am looking at:
DELL POWEREDGE T110 (not the II version, I think it's older)
INTEL XEON QUAD CORE X3430 2.40GHZ
4x4GB (16 TOTAL) DDR3 ECC UNBUFFERED RAM
A single WD RED 4TB - (need to read more about software RAID and what that means for total available space.)

Seems to give me what I want for a good price, is the (very) old server going to cause problems?
(Want to be able to put it in the closet and forget about it for months.)

 

[CraigD]

I would add at least another 4TB drive. Redundancy is the main reason to use freeNAS, the case holds four drives

Two 4TB drives with give you about 3.2TB of usable space

It will do what you want

Older servers normally use a little more power

Have Fun

 

[Inxsible]

Go with mirrored vdevs like Craig suggested. That's what I use and it has served me well. You can use 4TB drives now, but later add a new mirror with 2x6TB or 2x8TB depending on how much data space you need and what is cheaper at that time.

 

[CraigD]

I was thinking mirror now, then a 4 wide RAIDz2 later

With RAIDz2 any two drives can fail, you still have data.

Have Fun
PS You may have to flash the HBA

 

[Inxsible]

I was thinking mirror now, then a 4 wide RAIDz2 later

With RAIDz2 any two drives can fail, you still have data.

Have Fun
PS You may have to flash the HBA

True. But I have been using mirrors for quite some time and have yet to see an issue. As long as you set SMART monitoring and scrubs and snapshots, FreeNAS will let you know if there are issues. Then you simply replace the failing HDD.

Benefit of mirrors is that resilvering is much faster than any RAIDZ configuration. For more redundancy, you can go with 3-way mirror or even more, although that might get expensive quickly.
Another benefit is being able to use different size drives. I currently have 2x6TB as mirror 0 and 2x500GB as mirror 1 and 2x500GB as mirror 2

 

[recall9]

Yeah, seems like you aren't the only one preferring mirrors. http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs-not-raidz/
I'll just mirror with 2 drives to start anyway and I already backup the important stuff online too.

 

[Inxsible]

Yeah, seems like you aren't the only one preferring mirrors. http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs-not-raidz/
I'll just mirror with 2 drives to start anyway and I already backup the important stuff online too.

Remember though, that if you later want any form of RAIDZ, then you would have to destroy your entire pool and start from scratch.

ZFS does not allow changing one type of configuration to another. (even RAIDZ1<-->RAIDZ2)