dell t20 will be here

[johnathan]

i purchased a dell t20 (pentium) purchased another 8gb ecc stick. anyway. im planning on starting with 2 3tb wd reds. in a mirror eventually im wanting to get another 2 3tb and rebuild in a raidz1 is that optimal? its just going to have pictures, programs, and computer backups.

 

[nojohnny101]

I suspect you have not gotten any responses yet because what you asked is a "loaded question". What I mean is the immediate answer would be "it depends". It depends on the following:

- How much do you care about the data you have on the NAS?
- You do have a backup correct?
- What type of performance do you need?

Someone asked a similar question recently and there is relevant discussion there you could read through for deciding between raidz level or running mirrors.
See here: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/the-case-for-mirrors.46371/

 

[CookiesLikeWhoa]

RaidZ1 is not recommended for drives larger than 1TB.

So based on that alone, it is probably not optimal. With 4 drives Mirriors or RaidZ2 would provide the same amount of space. Mirrors will provide better performance.

 

[Mlovelace]

You will find most people are unconfortable with raidz1 when you get into drive sizes of 2TB+. I don't find it to be an unacceptable solution in the 3TB - 4TB drive size, with the caveat that, it is not the only copy of the data. There is no level of array redundancy that replaces having a backup of your data, period, no matter the raidz level you run.

 

[Stux]

Sweating bullets on a 4x3TB RAID5 rebuild convinced me to go for raid6/z2 in the future ;)

(In the end, after 5 days of rebuilding it did recover btw)

 

[IceBoosteR]

i purchased a dell t20 (pentium) purchased another 8gb ecc stick. anyway. im planning on starting with 2 3tb wd reds. in a mirror eventually im wanting to get another 2 3tb and rebuild in a raidz1 is that optimal? its just going to have pictures, programs, and computer backups.

Do you want to destroy your first pool and throw all 4x3TB disks in one RAIDZ1 pool together? Then you will losse all data on your first pool. Or do you want 2x2x3TB drive pools? If you plan for a backup, then definitely go with another system for that.

Sweating bullets on a 4x3TB RAID5 rebuild convinced me to go for raid6/z2 in the future ;)

(In the end, after 5 days of rebuilding it did recover btw)

Did you loose one disk in your RAIDZ1 pool and you aborted the recreation of the pool after 5 days?
That sounds horrible...

 

[Mlovelace]

Sweating bullets on a 4x3TB RAID5 rebuild convinced me to go for raid6/z2 in the future ;)

(In the end, after 5 days of rebuilding it did recover btw)

Why would you be sweating bullets, unless you don't have a backup of the data?

 

[Stux]

Why would you be sweating bullets, unless you don't have a backup of the data?

I forget the exact details. I believe I was restoring from backup after the primary had failed, and it was the backup that was a raid5, and that degraded.

At this stage I wasn't running continuous offsite backups.

 

[Stux]

Do you want to destroy your first pool and throw all 4x3TB disks in one RAIDZ1 pool together? Then you will losse all data on your first pool. Or do you want 2x2x3TB drive pools? If you plan for a backup, then definitely go with another system for that.




Did you loose one disk in your RAIDZ1 pool and you aborted the recreation of the pool after 5 days?
That sounds horrible...

This was not ZFS. It was a drobo 2nd gen.

As it turns out, those drobos, although they did support 3TB drives, something goes very wrong when you upgrade from 4x2TB to 4x3TB. I suspect they don't have enough RAM to cover it and their performance dives.

Anyway after a long rebuild it recovered fully. But I would've rather had additional redundancy.

This was provided later by a Drobo 5D with double parity.

We've outgrown that solution now and it came down to acquiring another drobo or something else.

I wasn't happy with the opacity of drobo and didn't want to invest more in drobos

FreeNAS/ZFS RAIDZ2 is the solution I've gone with. I prefer knowing what's happening... are scrubs happening? What about smart? Is bitrot taken care of?

 

[IceBoosteR]

This was not ZFS. It was a drobo 2nd gen.


FreeNAS/ZFS RAIDZ2 is the solution I've gone with. I prefer knowing what's happening... are scrubs happening? What about smart? Is bitrot taken care of?

Definitely agree with that point. A little bit more administration for more features and a safe feeling for your data ;)
But lets wait for the thread creator to come back to his thread.