chemikalguy
Cadet
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2020
- Messages
- 5
I'm building a new FreeNAS box after having not had one for a number of years. I have acquired all of the hardware I'm going to use, with the exception of disks, maybe. The main hardware I'm going to be using is all a bit dated, but is still better than most of off-the-shelf home NAS units that are out there, unless I spend a ton of money. I have:
Quad Core Xeon E3-1225 (w/ integrated video support)
16GB of ECC RAM
Intel Server motherboard w/dual Intel NICs (w/ four SATA ports)
LSI 9211 SAS/SATA controller card
Anyway, I have a mini-itx case that holds 8 hotswap hard drives that would be connected to the SAS/SATA controller card. It also has a spot for SSD caching drives which I was going to run off of the motherboard port(s). I had originally planned on using an SSD or two for caching, and some spinning disks for data storage. I have a number of 2TB, 3TB and even some 4TB drives. This unit will likely replace one that has about 6TB of usable storage space in it.
I have a stack of 6 180GB SSDs, though, and wondered if its possible to do tiered storage in FreeNAS. In my daytime job, I work with enterprise storage, and it has the ability to tier storage so that data that isn't accessed very often will automatically get moved down to the slower drives from the faster SSDs. I'm not even sure it's worth using all those SSDs for a high performance tier, as this is for home storage, media serving, etc. These drives are fairly inexpensive now, and I can pick up two more for about $50-60 if I wanted a full 8-drive pool, which would give me roughly 1TB of high performance storage if I use a two drive protection level, but that doesn't address the rest of my storage needs to get me to at least an equivalent amount to my existing NAS. I do like the idea of tiered storage, but that might not be an option.
I'd like to know what people thing of the storage options, so I can decide how to proceed.
Quad Core Xeon E3-1225 (w/ integrated video support)
16GB of ECC RAM
Intel Server motherboard w/dual Intel NICs (w/ four SATA ports)
LSI 9211 SAS/SATA controller card
Anyway, I have a mini-itx case that holds 8 hotswap hard drives that would be connected to the SAS/SATA controller card. It also has a spot for SSD caching drives which I was going to run off of the motherboard port(s). I had originally planned on using an SSD or two for caching, and some spinning disks for data storage. I have a number of 2TB, 3TB and even some 4TB drives. This unit will likely replace one that has about 6TB of usable storage space in it.
I have a stack of 6 180GB SSDs, though, and wondered if its possible to do tiered storage in FreeNAS. In my daytime job, I work with enterprise storage, and it has the ability to tier storage so that data that isn't accessed very often will automatically get moved down to the slower drives from the faster SSDs. I'm not even sure it's worth using all those SSDs for a high performance tier, as this is for home storage, media serving, etc. These drives are fairly inexpensive now, and I can pick up two more for about $50-60 if I wanted a full 8-drive pool, which would give me roughly 1TB of high performance storage if I use a two drive protection level, but that doesn't address the rest of my storage needs to get me to at least an equivalent amount to my existing NAS. I do like the idea of tiered storage, but that might not be an option.
I'd like to know what people thing of the storage options, so I can decide how to proceed.