Best Practices in pool organization......?

[GrahamBB]

Not sure if this type of question belongs here, but I couldn't see a more aptly named section...... Please feel free to move if I guessed wrongly.

So, I'm about to build a system and was pondering the best way to go about storage organization. In the past, I have tended to make the pool the size of the sum of all the disks, i.e., one big pool. I looked around and can't find anything that talks to the 'best' way of storage organization. Is one big pool ok, or are there better approaches?

Are there any threads, documents or sources that lay out the pros and cons of different approaches?

Cheers

 

[Glorious1]

Just my opinion, but I think it's easiest to have one pool for everything, and make datasets within it for major categories, and then, via a share, make folders inside the datasets as usual. That said, I do have two pools on my machine. The second is used for local backups via replication. If the main pool dies, I have the backup pool to recover from.

 

[gpsguy]

Another case for separate pools would be for different types of storage. For general use you might use RAIDz2. If you also needed block storage you might want a second pool consisting of striped mirrors.

Or maybe a pool with some SSD's.

 

[Glorious1]

Otherwise, one thing to keep in mind is, if you divide up your data in several pools, you lose flexibility. You may end up with lots of room on one pool when another is full. With datasets, you can always adjust allocation of space among them.

 

[GrahamBB]

Good thoughts, thanks. It would seem to be valuable to develop a set of papers about such topics as the use and sophistication of FreeNAS systems spreads.

Or perhaps there isn't much interest?

Cheers