Build Advice - Multiple Drives

[jamatlien]

Hi guys
Im in the process of setting up my first FreeNAS build (maybe two simultaneous builds) from a bunch of parts I acquired. I had a question concerning drives and how to best configure the array. The purpose of the server(s) will primarily be home media sstorage/plex;mostly movie and music, Some amount of ISO's as well. There will be some trans-coding.
Putting this in a dell 2900 server chassis. (can take 10 drives) dual xeon, 32gb ddr2 ECC
I also have an intel chassis (slightly newer) with a single quad core xeon, 16gb ddr3 ecc, can take 10 drives.

The folloing drives are all enterprise grade
3 - 3tb WD
4 - 2tb Seagates
8 - 1tb WD drives

consumer grade SSD's
1 480GB PNY
2 120GB Intel 530 ssd's
1 90GB Corsair
1 240 GB

I know its quite a mashup of drives.
How would you recommend distributing the drives for this build.

 

[m0nkey_]

3 - 3tb WD
4 - 2tb Seagates
8 - 1tb WD drives

Create three separate pools. Mixing all these drives in a single pool will become imbalanced affecting performance.

I would take your two SSDs (Intel 530) and use them in a mirror for your boot drive. The rest of the SSDs you can use elsewhere :D

 

[danb35]

Jettison the Dell system--it's going to use a front-side bus, which will kill your performance. Put the 2 TB and 3 TB disks into the other system, perhaps with another 3 TB disk, and make a single RAIDZ2 pool with them, expecting that you'll replace the 2 TB disks with 3 TB disks as time goes on.