Home FreeNAS server - will this suffice?

[thecoffeeguy]

hey folks

So, I need to put together a FreeNAS server for my house. My home lab server has grown to (3) ESXi servers, running a number of VM's and containers. I desperately need something for these VM's to be backed up to.

I was gifted a few items recently from a friend. Here is what I have:

SuperMicro mobo:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182251

Pentium CPU:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116887

Fractal Case: (I like the case. Good form factor, quiet and very solid built)
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811352011

The remaining pieces that I need to fill out are:

Hard Drives (obviously)
PSU - 500w? orr more?
Memory (32gib ideally)
NIC expansion card (gives me a total of 4 NICS as needed)

I was hoping to ask few questions for my own knowledge.
This will be my first real NAS for my house and something that will be critical for me (my lab is primarily for work)

That said, I have dabbled with FreeNAS, but not much beyond that.

one question i have is, what type of setup would i need to run to have my VM's live on the actual NAS? This way i could vmotion VM's, move them around etc. Would the above work? Does it lack the efficiency/power needed?


What would folks here suggest to build this out for increased functionality? (space for backups for my VM's, a simple file server for the home network, potentially run VM's from the NAS?) I am thinking do i need extra expansion cards?
I really am quite new to the NAS world, but super excited to get this setup.

Just looking for guidance from folks who have a lot more experience in this area than I do.

Many thanks.

CG

 

[kdragon75]

You will likely want to add a SLOG device. As for drives, how much space do you need and what are your workloads?
Why do you say you need 4 NICs? Have you considered 10GbE?

 

[thecoffeeguy]

You will likely want to add a SLOG device. As for drives, how much space do you need and what are your workloads?
Why do you say you need 4 NICs? Have you considered 10GbE?

I will need to read up on SLOG device.
Space wise, start with say 4-6TB, but leave room for growth.
4 NIC's is not required, just thought about dedicated a NIC or two for backups on a different network, but not something i am not set on.
I thought about 10Gbe, and was trying to think about how I would plug that into my existing network. Currently, have a 24 port Layer 2 managed switch setup with a couple VLANS. Recommendations there? Something I could grow into.
Open to options and suggestions though, without a doubt.
Thank you.

 

[joeschmuck]

So you want to run your VMs on the FreeNAS storage system, well of course you can do that but you need to research about how fast your storage must be available to you. You may desire to use iSCSI setup, and the pool configuration is critical as well to ensure fast throughput.

Next you have the 10Gbe as an option but that will be costly.

My advice is to take the hardware you have and build up your system, use it to backup your servers. Your ESXi servers will likely run much faster using local hard drives for storage.

One other suggestion: One time I created on my ESXi server a FreeNAS VM and a pool of two pair of mirrored drives and used iSCSI, used the VMXNET3 as the internal NICs and the data transfer rates were off the chart. I'm far from an expert on networking and fast systems but I thought it was very cool. If you have the hardware to support it, I'd give it a shot at least on one of your ESXi systems to see what it can do for you vice trying to run VMs off a remote system over slow Ethernet.

Good luck!

 

[thecoffeeguy]

So you want to run your VMs on the FreeNAS storage system, well of course you can do that but you need to research about how fast your storage must be available to you. You may desire to use iSCSI setup, and the pool configuration is critical as well to ensure fast throughput.

Maybe at some point. Maybe I plan that for down the road.

Next you have the 10Gbe as an option but that will be costly.

My advice is to take the hardware you have and build up your system, use it to backup your servers. Your ESXi servers will likely run much faster using local hard drives for storage.

One other suggestion: One time I created on my ESXi server a FreeNAS VM and a pool of two pair of mirrored drives and used iSCSI, used the VMXNET3 as the internal NICs and the data transfer rates were off the chart. I'm far from an expert on networking and fast systems but I thought it was very cool. If you have the hardware to support it, I'd give it a shot at least on one of your ESXi systems to see what it can do for you vice trying to run VMs off a remote system over slow Ethernet.

Good luck!

I kinda thing I should do that. Take what I have now, build something out, learn FreeNAS and then plan for the future.

That said, should a 500W PSU suffice for now?
Thinking something like this:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139210&ignorebbr=1

For memory, start with 16gb:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148770


And Drives suggestions?
Much obliged.

CG

EDIT: In regards to the memory, any suggestions on how i should check to make sure it will work ok with the mobo and FreeNAS? thx


EDIT: Also, what about these drives just for backspace:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?reviews=all&Item=N82E16822236343

I am all ears/eyes on recommendations since this is new territory for me. But I am excited. :)

 

[kdragon75]

Space wise, start with say 4-6TB, but leave room for growth.

So we should double to triple that for raw disk space. Using striped mirrors you give up half of you space to redundancy and read performance. That is if live VMs will be running here. For backups, plan for your data footprint + 2/3 years.

That said, should a 500W PSU suffice for now?

You cant even guess at this until at least the number of drives is worked out.

EDIT: In regards to the memory, any suggestions on how i should check to make sure it will work ok with the mobo and FreeNAS? thx

It will be fine with FreeNAS and should be fine with the motherboard. Just double check the manual.

EDIT: Also, what about these drives just for backspace:

Seems a bit silly to not get the 4TB drives given the price difference. If this was a Live VM storage system, I could see getting the smaller drives and having more of them for performance.

 

[joeschmuck]

The power supply looks fine for handling up to 8 hard drives (that is all I'd put on it even if it "could" handle more), note that it only comes with 5 SATA power connectors, that may not be an issue depending on how many drives you plan to use and if you plan to use 4-pin molex to SATA adapters or drive cages.

I love those drives, my 2TB WD Reds lasted over 5 years of power on time (continuious spinning as well). I saw the 3TB drives for $10 more on the NewEgg site, worth consideration, or even larger. You MUST know what your capacity needs to be and I also typically tell people to think out 3+ years (the warranty period of the drive), then most of the time I ask them to double it because people store data like crazy. Here is a formula for you to consider when figuring out your capacity... Final Capacity = Usable RAID Calculator Capacity - 20%, or - 50% if using iSCSI. To maintain a healthy and fast pool you need to have 20% free space. Use a RAID calculator (links below in my signature). Lets say you go with five 2TB hard drives in a RAIDZ1 (not my preferred configuration) then that leaves you with this... Usable Capacity = 7.3TB - 1.4TB (20%) = 5.84TB Final Capacity. If you are using this FreeNAS server as "Only a Backup" of your data, meaning that you have a copy of your data elsewhere then you can get away with a RAIDZ1 pool, but if you plan to have data solely on the FreeNAS server then a RAIDZ2 is preferred. This is just my opinion. If you changed to five 4TB drives as a RAIDZ1 then you end up with Usable Capacity 14.6TB - 2.9TB (20%) = 11.68TB Final Capacity.

Your RAM choice looks sound, it appears to match the specs of the QVL listed RAM for that motherboard, however I would also consider looking at RAM from surplus parts stores. RAM tyipically does not go bad and has a lifetime warranty. If you could purchase RAM for half the cost of new then that would be a good thing. It's worth looking into. Know your specs. Search for "M391B1G73BH0-CK0" and "HMT41GU7MFR8C-PB" and "MEM-DR380L-HL01-EU16" and "MEM-DR380L-SL01-EU16" but pay attention to the full part number, it's easy to have a single letter change occur and you end up with the wrong RAM, for example you could end up with Registered which is not what you want.

I doubt you will need more than 16GB RAM for this system however if you feel that you will want to run your VMs off your FreeNAS system, I can't say this strongly enough, consider a different system, one that you can expand up to 128GB RAM. An SLOG (ZIL) and L2ARC (both seperate SSDs) could offload hard drive performance issues such as if access the same data often it can be stored in the L2ARC but RAM is much faster so more RAM is better than an L2ARC. The SLOG speeds up the write operations significantly if you are writing a lot of random data. So if you were to add two SSDs to your mix, a small SSD (16GB or more) for the SLOG and a larger L2ARC SSD (128GB or larger) then you might have the best of both. I would add that you should really read up on SLOG (ZIL) and L2ARC, how they work and the advantages and disadvantages of each. You do not need to purchase these up front, they can be added or removed at any time. I'd just build up the basic system first and see where it takes you. Pool design is going to be the most important thing.

I would not purchase a NIC card at this time, you already have two NICs on the motherboard and if you use both of those then I might be surprised but give the onboard NICs a chance first, you can always add a NIC card later if you really need it.

 

[thecoffeeguy]

So we should double to triple that for raw disk space. Using striped mirrors you give up half of you space to redundancy and read performance. That is if live VMs will be running here. For backups, plan for your data footprint + 2/3 years.

You can't even guess at this until at least the number of drives is worked out.

It will be fine with FreeNAS and should be fine with the motherboard. Just double check the manual.

Seems a bit silly to not get the 4TB drives given the price difference. If this was a Live VM storage system, I could see getting the smaller drives and having more of them for performance.

Yea, i just did some numbers and reading and it seems like RAIDZ is the way to go.
That said, I changed my drives to (4) 4TB drives. That should at least get me going with my NAS and learning FreeNAS.

Ideally, at some point, i would like to store and run my VM's off of my NAS. However, that requires a pretty sizable investment that I would have to plan for.

I think for now, just getting FreeNAS up and running will be my priority. Long term goal would be a bigger FreeNAS server with lots of options (storage, VM usage etc.)

 

[thecoffeeguy]

The power supply looks fine for handling up to 8 hard drives (that is all I'd put on it even if it "could" handle more), note that it only comes with 5 SATA power connectors, that may not be an issue depending on how many drives you plan to use and if you plan to use 4-pin molex to SATA adapters or drive cages.

I love those drives, my 2TB WD Reds lasted over 5 years of power on time (continuious spinning as well). I saw the 3TB drives for $10 more on the NewEgg site, worth consideration, or even larger. You MUST know what your capacity needs to be and I also typically tell people to think out 3+ years (the warranty period of the drive), then most of the time I ask them to double it because people store data like crazy. Here is a formula for you to consider when figuring out your capacity... Final Capacity = Usable RAID Calculator Capacity - 20%, or - 50% if using iSCSI. To maintain a healthy and fast pool you need to have 20% free space. Use a RAID calculator (links below in my signature). Lets say you go with five 2TB hard drives in a RAIDZ1 (not my preferred configuration) then that leaves you with this... Usable Capacity = 7.3TB - 1.4TB (20%) = 5.84TB Final Capacity. If you are using this FreeNAS server as "Only a Backup" of your data, meaning that you have a copy of your data elsewhere then you can get away with a RAIDZ1 pool, but if you plan to have data solely on the FreeNAS server then a RAIDZ2 is preferred. This is just my opinion. If you changed to five 4TB drives as a RAIDZ1 then you end up with Usable Capacity 14.6TB - 2.9TB (20%) = 11.68TB Final Capacity.

Your RAM choice looks sound, it appears to match the specs of the QVL listed RAM for that motherboard, however I would also consider looking at RAM from surplus parts stores. RAM tyipically does not go bad and has a lifetime warranty. If you could purchase RAM for half the cost of new then that would be a good thing. It's worth looking into. Know your specs. Search for "M391B1G73BH0-CK0" and "HMT41GU7MFR8C-PB" and "MEM-DR380L-HL01-EU16" and "MEM-DR380L-SL01-EU16" but pay attention to the full part number, it's easy to have a single letter change occur and you end up with the wrong RAM, for example you could end up with Registered which is not what you want.

I doubt you will need more than 16GB RAM for this system however if you feel that you will want to run your VMs off your FreeNAS system, I can't say this strongly enough, consider a different system, one that you can expand up to 128GB RAM. An SLOG (ZIL) and L2ARC (both separate SSDs) could offload hard drive performance issues such as if access the same data often it can be stored in the L2ARC but RAM is much faster so more RAM is better than an L2ARC. The SLOG speeds up the write operations significantly if you are writing a lot of random data. So if you were to add two SSDs to your mix, a small SSD (16GB or more) for the SLOG and a larger L2ARC SSD (128GB or larger) then you might have the best of both. I would add that you should really read up on SLOG (ZIL) and L2ARC, how they work and the advantages and disadvantages of each. You do not need to purchase these up front, they can be added or removed at any time. I'd just build up the basic system first and see where it takes you. Pool design is going to be the most important thing.

I would not purchase a NIC card at this time, you already have two NICs on the motherboard and if you use both of those then I might be surprised but give the onboard NICs a chance first, you can always add a NIC card later if you really need it.

I may look for a big bigger PSU with 6 SATA connectors, just in case.
I upgraded those drives to the 4TB version per this thread and recommendation.

any suggestions on where to look for surplus store you like/recommend? if i can save some cash, that would be great.
I think 16gb should be good to get me going, at least forr this setup. Down the road...heheh
I will hold off on the NIC card per you recommendation.

Thanks everyone

 

[joeschmuck]

I would say that you do the basic system and then create a pool and try to use it as a VM datastore to see how it works for you. Maybe it will be fast enough for your needs. Now I'm thinking about reconfiguring mine, but I digress, maybe I shouldn't mess with what works.

I changed my drives to (4) 4TB drives.

And you are fully aware that you just can't add a single hard drive to this configuration to expand it, well not right now, maybe in the future. You would have to destroy the pool and recreate it to add a single drive. You could add another VDEV to expand your pool but that can be costly.

any suggestions on where to look for surplus store you like/recommend?

Just need to search the internet, I found a few places but trying to find a good deal is the hard part, but it can be done.

I may look for a big bigger PSU with 6 SATA connectors, just in case.

You don't need a higher capacity PSU, if you ever get to the point of adding two more hard drives, just buy a 4-pin Molex to SATA power adapter, I like the dual SATA power connectors myself and they work very well. Of course you could buy a different PSU that does have six SATA power connectors as well for only a few more bucks. This is up to you.

I upgraded those drives to the 4TB version per this thread and recommendation.

Remember, it's the capacity that you feel you will need over the next 3+ years as this is where you will save money by not having to spend more money on additional hard drives. Trust me, 3 years goes ny quickley. With this setup you will have ~8TB of usable space while retaining 20% free space to maintain a fast system.

 

[thecoffeeguy]

I would say that you do the basic system and then create a pool and try to use it as a VM datastore to see how it works for you. Maybe it will be fast enough for your needs. Now I'm thinking about reconfiguring mine, but I digress, maybe I shouldn't mess with what works.


And you are fully aware that you just can't add a single hard drive to this configuration to expand it, well not right now, maybe in the future. You would have to destroy the pool and recreate it to add a single drive. You could add another VDEV to expand your pool but that can be costly.


Just need to search the internet, I found a few places but trying to find a good deal is the hard part, but it can be done.

You don't need a higher capacity PSU, if you ever get to the point of adding two more hard drives, just buy a 4-pin Molex to SATA power adapter, I like the dual SATA power connectors myself and they work very well. Of course you could buy a different PSU that does have six SATA power connectors as well for only a few more bucks. This is up to you.


Remember, it's the capacity that you feel you will need over the next 3+ years as this is where you will save money by not having to spend more money on additional hard drives. Trust me, 3 years goes ny quickley. With this setup you will have ~8TB of usable space while retaining 20% free space to maintain a fast system.

yea, going to start simple first, get my feet wet, then move forward.

Right, yea. I recall that you cant add additional hard drives like that. You need to destroy and recreate.
i will do some googling for surplus memory :) thanks

Good to know on the PSU. I will order that today.

yea, i am starting to think that i need more space, just as i think off the top of my head. Going to sit down and play with a calculator, see what i need.

Thank you again!

 

[joeschmuck]

Some advice about hard drive capacity... Do not purchase anything greater than a 4TB drive if you are planning to run a RAIDZ1. Let me explain while I eat my oatmeal cookie and drink my Pepsi. When it comes to resilvering (replacing a failing hard drive) it will take longer with the more data you have on your pool/vdev so when you start to use 5TB or larger drives you will find out that it could take days to resilver a drive. This is not conducive to good data protection if you are running a RAIDZ1 system. If you have another drive failure during the resilvering process then you have total data loss. If you run very large hard drives then you should also be running a RAIDZ2 setup or have a backup of your important data elsewhere.

So first of all just forget about how many hard drives and what size they are, tell us what capacity you feel you would need and again, think about the drive lasting you at least 3 years, most of the time now I tell people to think out 5 years as most drives last about that long, normally I think people replace them becasue they just want more capacity, not because they have failed. So think about capacity. If you think you are going to run VMs directly from these hard drives just to play around then figure out the size of your vmdk files you would like to copy over and double it becasue we all have made copies to just play with. I can't imagine that you would need more than 2TB of storage for VM's at all. The next part is just how much storage do you need. I've been living very comfortable on ~7.5TB since I started FreeNAS and have never come close to running out. I upgraded ~6 months to four 6TB drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration. The data throughput is slower than the six 2TB WD Red drives I had been running in a RAIDZ2 configuration. Having more drives makes the data retrieval a bit quicker. This never impacted my normal use of the FreeNAS system.

I have no idea how much money you have to toss at this project which is why I suggested that you try to find some used/refurbished RAM to cut your costs, if you can get the RAM for $50 each then that is half your cost and you could buy 1 more hard drive :) But lets say you have a reasonable budget, you could purchase four hard drives now and two more later for a total of six hard drives. Place six 6TB drives in a RAIDZ2 and you have 21.8TB - 4.36TB = 17.4TB usable (double what I have for capacity). Also note that this is raw data, if you have compressable data then the storage would be more, I have two shares that are about x1.9 compltression ratio. Most of my storage however is 1.0 to 1.05% as the data is already compressed before it gets stored.

Also some other advice... I don't like using FreeNAS as a video storage vault, it is quite expensive. I know of people having larger than 40TB of storage just for video content via Plex, to me that is just crazy but if they have the money then more power to them. While I do host some video content, I am only just over 300GB of storage for that kind of content and I keep movies that my grandkids love to watch and a few movies that I or my wife would/have watched several times before and will watch again in less than a year. There is no way that I would need that kind of immediate content selection. Streaming services like NetFlix and Hulu tend to have much of this kind of content.

Sorry for the rambling but I did eat my cookie and am almost done with the Pepsi.

Good luck on whatever you do.

 

[thecoffeeguy]

Some advice about hard drive capacity... Do not purchase anything greater than a 4TB drive if you are planning to run a RAIDZ1. Let me explain while I eat my oatmeal cookie and drink my Pepsi. When it comes to resilvering (replacing a failing hard drive) it will take longer with the more data you have on your pool/vdev so when you start to use 5TB or larger drives you will find out that it could take days to resilver a drive. This is not conducive to good data protection if you are running a RAIDZ1 system. If you have another drive failure during the resilvering process then you have total data loss. If you run very large hard drives then you should also be running a RAIDZ2 setup or have a backup of your important data elsewhere.

So first of all just forget about how many hard drives and what size they are, tell us what capacity you feel you would need and again, think about the drive lasting you at least 3 years, most of the time now I tell people to think out 5 years as most drives last about that long, normally I think people replace them becasue they just want more capacity, not because they have failed. So think about capacity. If you think you are going to run VMs directly from these hard drives just to play around then figure out the size of your vmdk files you would like to copy over and double it becasue we all have made copies to just play with. I can't imagine that you would need more than 2TB of storage for VM's at all. The next part is just how much storage do you need. I've been living very comfortable on ~7.5TB since I started FreeNAS and have never come close to running out. I upgraded ~6 months to four 6TB drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration. The data throughput is slower than the six 2TB WD Red drives I had been running in a RAIDZ2 configuration. Having more drives makes the data retrieval a bit quicker. This never impacted my normal use of the FreeNAS system.

I have no idea how much money you have to toss at this project which is why I suggested that you try to find some used/refurbished RAM to cut your costs, if you can get the RAM for $50 each then that is half your cost and you could buy 1 more hard drive :) But lets say you have a reasonable budget, you could purchase four hard drives now and two more later for a total of six hard drives. Place six 6TB drives in a RAIDZ2 and you have 21.8TB - 4.36TB = 17.4TB usable (double what I have for capacity). Also note that this is raw data, if you have compressable data then the storage would be more, I have two shares that are about x1.9 compltression ratio. Most of my storage however is 1.0 to 1.05% as the data is already compressed before it gets stored.

Also some other advice... I don't like using FreeNAS as a video storage vault, it is quite expensive. I know of people having larger than 40TB of storage just for video content via Plex, to me that is just crazy but if they have the money then more power to them. While I do host some video content, I am only just over 300GB of storage for that kind of content and I keep movies that my grandkids love to watch and a few movies that I or my wife would/have watched several times before and will watch again in less than a year. There is no way that I would need that kind of immediate content selection. Streaming services like NetFlix and Hulu tend to have much of this kind of content.

Sorry for the rambling but I did eat my cookie and am almost done with the Pepsi.

Good luck on whatever you do.

Incredibly helpful and i agree with what you say.
To be honest, I really do not know how much storrage I need to begin with, but I don't think it will be more than 7tb. My plan right now is for virtual machine backups, some documents and such for work. No plans for anything like PLEX, video, pictures or music. Music might change in the future, but right now, this is about my VM lab and making sure i back those guys up.
At some point down the road, i would like to explore the options of running my VM's off the storage unit, but that is a future project for sure. Its a completely different beast from what i have learned.
So for now, just backups for my VM's basically. At max, I would run 25vms', and I am shooting high.
I like the idea of purchasing 4 hard drives now, 2 down the road. Allows me some options.

I kind of like the idea of smaller size drives for faster data retrieval.

Off the top of my head, thinking of purchasing (4) of those 2 or 3 TB RED drives, to get me started, then add 2 more down the road?

Many thanks!

TCG

 

[kdragon75]

I kind of like the idea of smaller size drives for faster data retrieval.

Smaller drive will not be faster. Smaller drives may make sense if your priority is performance over capacity. This is only because you need many drive to be fast but you don't need 8x4TB of capacity. You only need 8x drives worth of performance. Think about the VMs the drives are supporting. I know your not running VM at the moment but just for example, you have 25 VMs. That means you need 25 drives worth of performance. This is not exact otherwise virtualization would never work but you cant run 25 VMs with any kind of load on 4 drives (no matter the size) without performance sucking. That is unless you are using SSDs but that's another conversation about ZFS, L2ARC and memory requirements.

 

[joeschmuck]

I kind of like the idea of smaller size drives for faster data retrieval.

I think you misunderstood me, smaller hard drives will resilver faster just becasue they are apt to have less data on them, the transfer rate will be basically the same if it's a 2TB WD Red ot 4TB WD Red of the same spindle speed. If you want fast then you would need faster spindle speeds and higher density from a hard drive perspective.

I have no fear that you will build your system and after a few weeks to few months you will want to change it around. We all have that type of experience. I started with four 2TB drives, moved to six 2TB drives, moved to four 6TB drives. The latter move was purely to reduce heat and just try out some different drives, my pool was ultimately slower.

 

[kdragon75]

I think you misunderstood me, smaller hard drives will resilver faster just becasue they are apt to have less data on them, the transfer rate will be basically the same if it's a 2TB WD Red ot 4TB WD Red of the same spindle speed. If you want fast then you would need faster spindle speeds and higher density from a hard drive perspective.

I have no fear that you will build your system and after a few weeks to few months you will want to change it around. We all have that type of experience. I started with four 2TB drives, moved to six 2TB drives, moved to four 6TB drives. The latter move was purely to reduce heat and just try out some different drives, my pool was ultimately slower.

Im thinking of doing the same. Moving from 8 3TB drives to 2 10+TB drives and moving to 64GB of RAM with an NVMe L2ARC only for the zvol datasets. All in an effort to save power and heat.

 

[joeschmuck]

Im thinking of doing the same. Moving from 8 3TB drives to 2 10+TB drives and moving to 64GB of RAM with an NVMe L2ARC only for the zvol datasets. All in an effort to save power and heat.

So long as you have a backup for all that data or you don't care if it disappears during a hard drive resilvering operation. But I completely relate to wanting to save some heat/power and cost. If you don't need a fast system then this works fine. The L2ARC can only do so much and you probably already know that an L2ARC can also cause your system to slow down. In my situation I waited until my drives were 5 years of age and then purchased the new hard drives, trying to be cost effective.

 

[kdragon75]

So long as you have a backup for all that data or you don't care if it disappears during a hard drive resilvering operation. But I completely relate to wanting to save some heat/power and cost. If you don't need a fast system then this works fine. The L2ARC can only do so much and you probably already know that an L2ARC can also cause your system to slow down. In my situation I waited until my drives were 5 years of age and then purchased the new hard drives, trying to be cost effective.

Yeah the L2ARC needs to be setup correctly and sometimes tuned a bit. SSD for L2ARC and X-Point for SLOG ;)

 

[thecoffeeguy]

I think you misunderstood me, smaller hard drives will resilver faster just becasue they are apt to have less data on them, the transfer rate will be basically the same if it's a 2TB WD Red ot 4TB WD Red of the same spindle speed. If you want fast then you would need faster spindle speeds and higher density from a hard drive perspective.

I have no fear that you will build your system and after a few weeks to few months you will want to change it around. We all have that type of experience. I started with four 2TB drives, moved to six 2TB drives, moved to four 6TB drives. The latter move was purely to reduce heat and just try out some different drives, my pool was ultimately slower.

I did. hehehe...whoopsie.

Yea, so many cool things to test out. You mention heat, is that something i should worrry about?
I was goign to purchase the PSU and (4) of the 3TB drives to get started. I have a feeling, i will mix it up down the road, for sure.

Thank you!

 

[thecoffeeguy]

Smaller drive will not be faster. Smaller drives may make sense if your priority is performance over capacity. This is only because you need many drive to be fast but you don't need 8x4TB of capacity. You only need 8x drives worth of performance. Think about the VMs the drives are supporting. I know your not running VM at the moment but just for example, you have 25 VMs. That means you need 25 drives worth of performance. This is not exact otherwise virtualization would never work but you can't run 25 VMs with any kind of load on 4 drives (no matter the size) without performance sucking. That is unless you are using SSDs but that's another conversation about ZFS, L2ARC and memory requirements.

Good to know. Really appreciate it.
Lots to learn, but love it.