FreeNAS Without the RAID

[carlmart]

What about using FreeNAS without raid at all, with the HDDs all independent and separate?

Just managing when they turn and off and things like that

 

[sretalla]

What about using FreeNAS without raid at all, with the HDDs all independent and separate?

You could do one disk per pool and have multiple pools.

Many of the things you might want to use may not work with things like symbolic links, so the idea of treating things with a single namespace will not work for jail mounts or NFS shares, for example, but if you want to manage what uses which disk in a way that works, why not? (other than the lack of redundancy).

 

[carlmart]

I do not want redundancy, if it implies doubling the quantity of HDDs or risking all the disks data if one HDD fails, if I got it right.

I would prefer to have a backup disk, same size as the others (10TB), and watch each HDD health. At the minimum warning of possible risk transfer all the data of that HDD to the backup.

If you can suggest an alternative that would keep each HDD independent and still diminish risk, please do so.

 

[sretalla]

If you can suggest an alternative that would keep each HDD independent and still diminish risk, please do so.

You could do one disk per pool and have multiple pools.

You can't escape the risk without redundancy, but watching things closely (if that's something you think you can/want to do for years) is something.

Using separate pools (1 per disk) will limit what will work and how, but it seems to be the option you want.

 

[danb35]

IMO, FreeNAS is not the droid you're looking for. Yes, it can probably be made to work, but you'd probably be better served by a different solution like Unraid.

 

[carlmart]

A basic problem with Unraid: unRAID allows to use filled disks but only if they are already formatted with the ReiserFS, XFS or Btrfs filesystems. But not ext4 or NTFS, the two most common filesystems used in Linux and Windows. So I'd say it's out.

Please, elaborate how using separate pools will limit what will work and how.

 

[danb35]

So I'd say it's out.

If unRAID is out due to lack of support for ext4 and NTFS, then FreeNAS is definitely not what you're looking for.

 

[HoneyBadger]

If you want to preserve data from existing Linux/Windows partitions, I'd suggest just standing up a CentOS install and sharing things out yourself if you aren't going to be doing any kind of redundancy whatsoever.

 

[carlmart]

If unRAID is out due to lack of support for ext4 and NTFS, then FreeNAS is definitely not what you're looking for.

Why? Why not using separate pools as suggested above?

 

[danb35]

Why not using separate pools as suggested above?

Separate pools still won't give you support for ext4 or NTFS. FreeNAS does ZFS and only ZFS.

 

[carlmart]

What about CentOS then? What would be different, pro and con, from FreeNAS?

 

[danb35]

What would be different

Pretty much everything would be different, starting with the base operating system. CentOS is a server-focused distribution of Linux, which would let you set up volumes and shares in whatever way you like (at least as long as you have the skill to implement it). It doesn't have a GUI for point-and-click administration. As a result, it doesn't have the limitations of that GUI, which only permits you to do things in a certain way (which does not including mounting and sharing disks formatted in ext4 or NTFS).

 

[Chris Moore]

We all know who good Microsoft is at storage...

Not everyone understands how horrible Microsoft is an storage. I quit trusting MS and Windows to store data over a decade ago.

 

[Arwen]

...
I would prefer to have a backup disk, same size as the others (10TB), and watch each HDD health. At the minimum warning of possible risk transfer all the data of that HDD to the backup.
...

Sometimes when a sector of a hard disk drive fails, it's gone. No warning, no recovery. Most hard disk drives can handle a certain amount of error bits in a sector. In the distant past that was 11 bit burst out of 512 byte sectors. I have no clue what it is today, (most hard drives now use 4K byte sectors).

So you could have your scheme of independant hard drives, with good, solid backups. And still loose data.

Further, NAS hard drives or other hard disk drives with TLER, (Time Limited Error Recovery), may not be the ideal choice for an independant drive configuration like what you are describing. Having a drive become un-available to make every effort to recover your data sounds like a better choice, than a NAS hard drive with TLER.

I don't have any suggestions on what OS or NAS software would make a good choice for you. But I do agree with others that FreeNAS seems to be a poor choice for the configuration you want.

 

[Chris Moore]

If you can suggest an alternative that would keep each HDD independent and still diminish risk, please do so.

Mitigating the risk of data loss and system down-time is one of the key reasons for any kind of RAID. You are in a classic situation of wanting to have the cake and eat it too. The thing you need to do, to keep your data safe from disk failure, is configure FreeNAS with a RAIDz2 storage pool using other disks, not the existing ones; then copy all your data into that storage space. After that, you have the option of what to do with your old disks.

@Arwen has a good point though, if you are using single disks for data storage, you should use regular desktop hard drives, not NAS drives. NAS drives are designed and intended to be used in some type of redundant configuration that would allow the data to be pulled from one of the other member disks if one of the disks has an error. Using NAS disks in a single disk configuration can lead to data loss when a 'plain' desktop drive might have tried harder to get your data back.

 

[carlmart]

How do I know which is a desktop HDD and which a NAS HDD?

 

[Chris Moore]

How do I know which is a desktop HDD and which a NAS HDD?

This article discusses the differences and shows some examples, I didn't read it all but it appears to have the information that would answer your question:
https://nascompares.com/2017/09/08/...and-standard-hard-drives-is-it-all-a-big-con/

 

[carlmart]

Pretty much everything would be different, starting with the base operating system. CentOS is a server-focused distribution of Linux, which would let you set up volumes and shares in whatever way you like (at least as long as you have the skill to implement it). It doesn't have a GUI for point-and-click administration. As a result, it doesn't have the limitations of that GUI, which only permits you to do things in a certain way (which does not including mounting and sharing disks formatted in ext4 or NTFS).

Which other Linux server distributor would require "less skill" than CentOS to assemble my server?

 

[Johnnie Black]

Which other Linux server distributor would require "less skill" than CentOS to assemble my server?

If you want a simple solution, I would still say Unraid, there's a plugin called Unassigned Devices that permits to easyly mount and share single disks of various filesystems, including ntfs and ext4.

 

[carlmart]

I want a Linux free program that manage separate NTFS formatted HDDs.