The time has come to make one of our FreeNAS servers bigger. We use these to store student project files and need to expand the types of projects stored on the FreeNAS server. We used to have a Studio Network Solutions EVO 64TB raw server for video files, this got old and unreliable so I shut it down. We moved the students back to buying USB hard drives last Spring. Come this week and a student dropped their drive, and it is toast. Now we swing back to one of the original reasons we had that $60,000usd video server, it is much safer to store the files on it.
Since I've been slowly moving all of our file shares over to FreeNAS, and they have become a nice stable thing to have around, we are thinking of building one of them much bigger.
What I have is a SuperMicro X10DRi with dual E5-2603 v4 processors, and 32GB of ram with 8 drive bays and 1TB SATA HGST drives in each bay. RAIDZ2 configuration to get a little more speed out of them. Currently only dual gigabit connections (aggregated) but I'll step up to dual 10gb connections with the drives (again aggregated). Each client has a gigabit connection and at most we would see about 26 clients trying to move video files at any one given time (about 2000mbps total). With the compression that we use, I've had 10 clients with 2 video streams running across the dual gigabit connections with zero issues. Video files are 35mbps (nominal). Current drives are just whatever flavor of SATA comes on that main board, nothing really special as it was a "budget build". Using SSD for the boot drives (mirrored) on the 9th and 10th SATA connections, had some bad luck with USB drives. Currently on 11.1uX but I need to schedule a time to get it on the newer OS.
Now on to the question since the last time this was really addressed was four or five years ago (or the search is failing me):
RED NAS or RED PRO NAS drives? Budget is a little limited, else I would be using HGST again. Looking to go up to 6tb drives as minimum, and 12tb drives as ideal, and still eight drives in the array. About $2000usd to $4000usd is the range between the two configurations (48tb raw up to 96tb raw). With our current class sizes the 48TB might just squeak by each semester, if enrollment goes up again, then I'll have wanted more, so trying to err on the side of caution and go bigger.
Eventually I'll beg for the money to configure an identical server as a backup/snapshot, but one step at a time. Backup could use cheaper drives.
If not the WD drives, what drives should I look at?
Thanks, Greg
Since I've been slowly moving all of our file shares over to FreeNAS, and they have become a nice stable thing to have around, we are thinking of building one of them much bigger.
What I have is a SuperMicro X10DRi with dual E5-2603 v4 processors, and 32GB of ram with 8 drive bays and 1TB SATA HGST drives in each bay. RAIDZ2 configuration to get a little more speed out of them. Currently only dual gigabit connections (aggregated) but I'll step up to dual 10gb connections with the drives (again aggregated). Each client has a gigabit connection and at most we would see about 26 clients trying to move video files at any one given time (about 2000mbps total). With the compression that we use, I've had 10 clients with 2 video streams running across the dual gigabit connections with zero issues. Video files are 35mbps (nominal). Current drives are just whatever flavor of SATA comes on that main board, nothing really special as it was a "budget build". Using SSD for the boot drives (mirrored) on the 9th and 10th SATA connections, had some bad luck with USB drives. Currently on 11.1uX but I need to schedule a time to get it on the newer OS.
Now on to the question since the last time this was really addressed was four or five years ago (or the search is failing me):
RED NAS or RED PRO NAS drives? Budget is a little limited, else I would be using HGST again. Looking to go up to 6tb drives as minimum, and 12tb drives as ideal, and still eight drives in the array. About $2000usd to $4000usd is the range between the two configurations (48tb raw up to 96tb raw). With our current class sizes the 48TB might just squeak by each semester, if enrollment goes up again, then I'll have wanted more, so trying to err on the side of caution and go bigger.
Eventually I'll beg for the money to configure an identical server as a backup/snapshot, but one step at a time. Backup could use cheaper drives.
If not the WD drives, what drives should I look at?
Thanks, Greg