How many drives for ZFS

[Malita]

I'm in the beginning stages of setting up my NAS box. I already have a 2 TB WD Red drive and I just ordered another 3 TB red drive because I see that it is recommended to set up ZFS.

What are is the (realistic) amount of drives and or storage space needed to create the right ZFS setup?

And once I setup the volume with these 2 drives, do I have the option to add more drives?

 

[alexg]

I would suggest you do some searching and reading forum posts by Cyberjock. Start with this one

http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Do you homework. If you think that you can setup ZFS with 2 drives, perhaps this is not for you.

 

[Malita]

I would suggest you do some searching and reading forum posts by Cyberjock. Start with this one

http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Do you homework. If you think that you can setup ZFS with 2 drives, perhaps this is not for you.

I never said I could..I simply asked how many and if I could add more if I wanted to.

 

[nunavat2012]

I would go like this. I would start with one vdev of two of 2TB; then would add another vdev with similar pair of drives (either two of 2TB or two of 3TB).

AFIK, you could add vdevs but, you can't add drives to existing vdevs.

 

[alexg]

What is the right setup for you? For example, I have 3 x 2TB drives setup in RAIDZ1 and I'm well aware of risks using RAIDZ1 vs RAIDZ2 and have two levels of backups for extra safety. RAIDZ2 with minimum of 4 drives will give you better protection and strongly recommended. It is all explained in various posts. My 3 x 2TB drives give me approx 3.5 TB of storage. There several ZFS space calculators on the internet. Just google and you will find them. It took me 3-4 months of reading, playing on test system, and then more reading until I build my real server using ECC memory, 12GB of memory, and hardware designed to run as 24x7 server.

 

[Malita]

Thank you nunavat2012 and alexg!

At first, I didn't care for redundancy (I never had a drive fail on me and I didn't think it was necessary). This NAS build is mainly for a media server that I would like to access remotely as well. But after watching YouTube vids and browsing, it looks like ZFS is a main topic when it comes to FreeNas. So I figured I must have to do it since its HIGHLY recommended.

So I already ordered the 3 TB drive from Amazon with next day shipping before I made this post. So I may have to go to my local store and pick up another 2 TB tomorrow and get another 3 TB in a couple weeks. Most likely I will have to mount it in my 5.25 bay.

Is it possible to use external hard drives as well?

 

[alexg]

I never had a drive fail on me and I didn't think it was necessary

I'm speechless. If you don't care about redundancy, why are you looking at FreeNAS and ZFS.

 

[Malita]

Lol. I was going to just buy a NAS from Buffalo, Netgear, WD or 1 of the others. But after doing more research, I realized I could make my own with what I had and just buy some drives.

And with more research, FreeNas was the go to OS and ZFS was always mentioned and recommended. So after finally getting FreeNas installed (I bumped into some problems early on) and walking through the quick start guide, I decided to do it right so I wouldn't hate myself later. This is going to be a medium sized project for me especially getting all my media from my externals to the internals.

Side note: How did you copy you data to your NAS drives?

 

[alexg]

I did all my copies over the network from my old Windows Home Server, but you can also import data directly. It is explained in the FreeNAS documentation

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Volumes

 

[Malita]

Thank you alexg..I know you read my posts and figured I should just go away. But its my 1st time I really do appreciate your help.

Please believe me when I say that I did look at those docs before I started asking questions. But they wasn't as straight forward and to the point as I would like it. Since I know I don't have to rush and get this thing up and running, reading it now is more clear.

 

[alexg]

No problem. Just make sure you plan your storage and memory requirements properly. I picked ZFS due to its data protection features.