Best way to use many disks

[bawilson2]

I'm looking at building a FreeNAS server with 36 disks. I'm leaning towards setting up three vdevs of 11 disks each in RAIDZ3. That would leave 3 spares but I'd read that 11 is the largest preferred size for RAIDZ3. The three vdevs would then have the data striped across similar to a raid-60.

Would that be the recommended setup for something this large?

Is there any practical limit to the number of vdevs that could be added to the zpool if additional disks were added?

Other things I should consider before moving forward?

 

[cyberjock]

Sounds like you pretty much got a good plan. Just make sure that the hardware you buy is actually compatible with FreeNAS. You should read through ALL of the stickies in the forum sections. Those are where the notorious building errors are discussed and how to not do them. I wouldn't do anything less than 32GB of RAM, and I'd stick to hardware that lets you go up to at least 128GB of RAM in case you need it. Nothing sucks more than pool performance suddenly taking a nosedive to single digit MB/sec, you need to add more RAM but your board is maxed out. I've been there and done it. I couldn't stream a single movie as the only user of the server. So try to plan ahead for possible future needs you may have.

There is no limit to the number of vdevs. As the number of vdevs increases the performance of the pool should increase too. You'll probably be limited to your NIC speed even with just 1 vdev unless you are going 10Gb.

 

[jgreco]

look for my posts discussing the vmware view desktop recommendations.