Hey. I've been reading up on FreeNAS for a while and finally took the plunge and bought the hardware. I have worked in high level IT for almost a decade now so the hardware basics were easy, found a good deal on a lenovo thinkserver and loaded it up with high quality ECC RAM. I've got a UPS ready for it and already have a high quality router with gigabit everything else.
My goal is reliability, with storage space secondary, and speed a distant third (This will just be for use as a fileshare for my video collections, and my giant directories of application installers). In the past I have just setup RAID1 arrays on a fileserver but always had a lot of issues with bad rebuilds and corruption (cheap RAID controllers probably the main culprit). My interest in FreeNAS is for a high reliability and highly redundant setup.
Anyways I was hoping to use mostly drives I have on hand (The server will only support 5x drives MAX, i know this kind've sucks but should be fine for my needs), except after taking a look I only have 2x 3TB Seagates (ST3000DM001) and 2x 2 TB Western digital blacks. So I could do two RAID 1 sets under ZFS, but I would be much more interested in doing something like buying three more 3TB drives and doing a RAIDZ, or RAIDZ2 setup with one hot spare.
So my questions are:
1. Does the 4x 3TB drives in RAIDZ with one extra as a hot spare make sense? Is there any reason that having only one VDEV like that be ill-advised?
and
2. The two 3TB's i currently have are consumer level 7200 RPM drives. I know ideally I would do something like WD Reds at 5400, but since I already have these two I was thinking of just matching their specs with the next three I purchase. I figure this way I don't lose the benefit of the 7200 RPMs, and the reliability of NAS specific drives would be a negligible improvement considering the redundancy provided by say a RAIDZ2 setup.
I would appreciate feedback
Thanks.
My goal is reliability, with storage space secondary, and speed a distant third (This will just be for use as a fileshare for my video collections, and my giant directories of application installers). In the past I have just setup RAID1 arrays on a fileserver but always had a lot of issues with bad rebuilds and corruption (cheap RAID controllers probably the main culprit). My interest in FreeNAS is for a high reliability and highly redundant setup.
Anyways I was hoping to use mostly drives I have on hand (The server will only support 5x drives MAX, i know this kind've sucks but should be fine for my needs), except after taking a look I only have 2x 3TB Seagates (ST3000DM001) and 2x 2 TB Western digital blacks. So I could do two RAID 1 sets under ZFS, but I would be much more interested in doing something like buying three more 3TB drives and doing a RAIDZ, or RAIDZ2 setup with one hot spare.
So my questions are:
1. Does the 4x 3TB drives in RAIDZ with one extra as a hot spare make sense? Is there any reason that having only one VDEV like that be ill-advised?
and
2. The two 3TB's i currently have are consumer level 7200 RPM drives. I know ideally I would do something like WD Reds at 5400, but since I already have these two I was thinking of just matching their specs with the next three I purchase. I figure this way I don't lose the benefit of the 7200 RPMs, and the reliability of NAS specific drives would be a negligible improvement considering the redundancy provided by say a RAIDZ2 setup.
I would appreciate feedback
Thanks.