Best ZFS Setup With 3 x 1TB HDDs

[JonnyAlpha]

Hi;

Am am building a new NAS setup after playing with a test setup using 3 old mixed size drives. I have just installed 8.3.0 on a 8GB USB Stick and after setting up the initial settings will be setting up the storage.

I have 3 x Brand New 1TB WD Caviar Green SATA Drives.
I will using my NAS to hold all of my Movies / Home Video / Photos / Music to be accessed by a mixed Mac / PC network / Home Cinema (Probably only one device at a time). I also want to use my NAS as a backup for my PC and my 2 x Macs, probably using Time Machine.

What is the best ZFS option for the above, to give me data protection and decent performance, read speed is probably more important t prevent stuttering when watching movies / listening to music.

The mobo in the NAS is from an Acer Aspire M3610 which I think is Gigabit and my router is a Speedport W 723V which is capable of up to 300MBs and I am using CAT5e which is also Gigabit capable so the network hardware should be good.

Thanks

 

[JaimieV]

Straight RAIDZ1 should be your first port of call. And last! For resilience it has to be a RAIDZ, and the only other possibility of RAIDZ2 would be silly.

It'll have no trouble with read speed, you'd be surprised at how low bitrate movies actually are. What you need is consistency rather than speed - and you'll get that by having enough RAM.

What you might consider is adding one of the old drives as a separate volume (ie a stripe set of one, not connected to the RAIDZ1 above) and use that for your Time Machine backups - this saves the effort of messing with datasets and quotas, and avoids wasting great swathes of your resilient storage on backups.

 

[JonnyAlpha]

So the best option for my 3 x HDDs would be RAID Z1, using one of my spare HDDs as a separate Stripe for Time Machine?

What if I were to use one of my old 1TB HDDs with my 3 x New Ones (I have a spare 1TB SATA HDD and 1 x Spare SATA port on the Mobo) what ZFS / RAID option could I go for then? Or is it worth it?

I'm guessing once I setup my 3 x HDD RAIDZ1 the only upgrade option I would have would be to replace the drives with larger capacity drives should the need arise? With a RAIDZ1 setup would I have 2TB of storage space? (3x1TB)-(1x1TB)=2TB?

 

[JaimieV]

Have you gone through Noobsauce80's tutorial in the stick at the top of the Noobs forum? Well worth it, go do that now.

You can certainly include the older 1Tb if you like. Depending on whether you want space over more resilience, choose RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2 for 4 disks.

Yes, for upgrading later you can increase space without having to rebuild by replacing all the 1Tb disks with eg 3Tb ones, one at a time. This is cheaper and quicker if you have fewer disks in the RAIDZ set, which may influence your choice of setting up (three and one) or (four) disks now.

3x1Tb in RAIDZ1 is indeed 2Tb space. So is 4x1Tb in RAIDZ2.

 

[JonnyAlpha]

Have you gone through Noobsauce80's tutorial in the stick at the top of the Noobs forum? Well worth it, go do that now.

Can't find the tutorial by Noobsauce80??

 

[JaimieV]

http://forums.freenas.org/forumdisplay.php?2-Help-amp-Support , FreeNAS 4 Noobs, sticky (not stick!) at top.

 

[JaimieV]

Sticky (not stick!) at the top of the FreeNAS 4 Noobs forum next door.

 

[JonnyAlpha]

Sticky (not stick!) at the top of the FreeNAS 4 Noobs forum next door.

Sorry still can't find it, can you post the link.

 

[JaimieV]

Oh, that's confusing. Noobsauce80 seems to have renamed himself Cyberjock, so no wonder you couldn't see it. It's the top sticky at
http://forums.freenas.org/forumdisplay.php?5-FreeNAS-4-N00bs

 

[JaimieV]

Oh, that's confusing. Noobsauce80 seems to have just renamed himself Cyberjock, so no wonder you couldn't find it by author. It's the top sticky "Slideshow explaining.... " at the FreeNAS-4-N00bs forum, anyway.