FreeNAS on Dell PowerVault MD1200 for serving Xplane scenery?

[GodAtum]

I'm looking to setup a network share for serving Xplane photo scenery so I guess I will need high read speed (and not concerned with write speed although the faster the better). Looking to use an MD1200 connected via 6gbps SAS to a Dell R610 running an LSI SAS 9207-8e (which I believe supports JBOD out of the box). R610 will have bare-metal Freenas. Around 5 PCs will need to be connected to it. Later I plan to add a NetApp Chelsio 10GB S320 network card. Will Freenas report the SMART stats fully?

 

[Chris Moore]

Will Freenas report the SMART stats fully?

It should. That is a SAS disk shelf. I have a system at work with 4 shelves, 16 drives each, connected and they all work perfectly.
Just be sure you have the latest firmware in the SAS controller.

How were you thinking to configure the drives?

 

[GodAtum]

i am thinking RAIDZ with 12 2TB drives.

 

[Chris Moore]

i am thinking RAIDZ with 12 2TB drives.

Depends on what you call high read speed and the fault tolerance required.
RAIDz2 will provide more data protection, but you might want to consider two 6 drive vdevs. That should give you better performance.
What amount of storage space do you need?

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[GodAtum]

I don't need a high amount of fault tolerance if RAIDZ is much faster then RAIDZ2. I could cope with two 6 drive vdevs at RAIDZ at 10TB each.

 

[Chris Moore]

I don't need a high amount of fault tolerance if RAIDZ is much faster then RAIDZ2. I could cope with two 6 drive vdevs at RAIDZ at 10TB each.

The difference between RAIDz, RAIDz2 and RAIDz3 is primarily in the number of drives for fault tolerance; speed should be essentially the same.
The two vdevs would be in the same storage pool, so the free space would be aggregated, not two separate spaces.
It is the additional vdev that would provide additional performance. Each vdev (virtual device) in the ZFS pool provides about the performance of a single drive. So, if you take twelve drives and map them as a single RAIDz vdev in a ZFS storage pool, you get about the performance of one drive. If you take the same twelve drives and split it into two 6 drive vdevs, you get about the performance of two drives. It is the number of vdevs in the pool that gain you additional performance. It is this feature of ZFS that causes many people to choose mirror vdevs. With mirrors, and 12 drives, you could have 6 vdevs, which would give you the most potential performance. More drives allowes more vdevs which allows more performance.
I have a storage server at work that is 60 drives in mirror vdevs with a SSDs for cache (SLOG and L2ARC) all to make it go fast for a database application.

It sounds like you are new to the ZFS / FreeNAS arena, you might want to do a little light reading to help get up to speed:

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/