brando56894
Wizard
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2014
- Messages
- 1,537
I guess you're asking for advice?
You would be better served with a SAS controller instead of just the built-in SATA of the system board. You don't tell much about your hardware, but it is a simple matter to pick up a used 24 bay server from eBay and get that working with FreeNAS.
A setup with 50ish TB of storage would be easy as long as you can afford to buy the hardware. I did have an IBM M1015 HBA that I had all my drives connected to but that randomly died when I was swapping our hardware a week or two ago, so now I'm back to using the SATA ports on my board. I'm waiting on getting my Asus X99-W so I can install my Xeon E5-1650 in it and get rid of my SuperMicro X10SDV-F-0
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Not really, just a general rant/word vomit/thoughts on FreeNAS compared to unRAID haha I wish I had the space for a rackmount server but I live right in a 2 bedroom apartment right outside of NYC (and plan to move into NYC proper soon) so space is at a premium. I have a hard enough time hiding my 12 + 1 + 2 bay full tower case that houses my current server.
@brando56894 I hear ya on the funds issue and i'm sure a number of others do as wells but are you in the GUI enough to worry about it? I've lost a fair amount of data that I believed I could reclaim easily and was mistaken on some of it, that was the beginning of my raid journey. I had mirrors in my desktop for years after that and liked it for the same reasons you did but the lost space became an issue when i started to fill them up. Then i found freenas and raidZ2 and I've been happy ever since it's takes a long time to restore from a backup or re-rip all your dvd's (still haven't completed that....) I feel the time I've lost having to restore the data I've lost is worth the 25 or so percent of inaccessible storage +the offsite storage (if you do the math I actually have less then %50 of the storage usable at the moment if you include off-site storage lol). I'm upgrading to 8TB drives as my 2TB drives pass the 40k hours mark and start failing (this weekend lost one) I did what @Chris Moore suggested and grabbed a noisy, really noisy used multibay case online and it has made everything easier from backing up using @Arwen method to replacing failed drives/adding addition storage.
I can't leave things alone and love to watch statistics, so I'm always tweaking something or trying something new so I'm always in the GUI hahaha About 90% of my data can be reacquired within about a week or so, so I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter if I lose it because it's all "disposable" anyway. All my important stuff is already backed up in multiple places and equals maybe about 10-20 GB hahaha I started out using RAIDZ when I first found FreeNAS 3 years ago and was baffled and kind of pissed off regarding the large amount of pre-planning that went into creating your pool since I was used to RAID5 which I had had in my server for a few years and could upgrade the array relatively easily.
RaidZ2 will actually write faster than mirrors for sequential transfers. I'd ignore the ugly gui personally... afterall... are yu really going to be staring at it much once its setup? Meanwhile you don't *have* to respect the 80%ruleguideline. Things slow down significantly at 90% though.
Is that so? Interesting! I had only used RAIDZ for a few months before I ditched it and went to mirrors and can't remember what the performance was like. I've always read that out of Striped Mirrors, RAIDZ and RAIDZ2, Mirrors were the flat out fastest and RAIDZ2 was the slowest since it has to calculate double parity.
I have a server at work that uses 6TB drives and it took over 36 hours to resilver one of the disks when I had to replace it. The pool is only 33% full, I can't imagine how long it will take to resilver once the pool is closer to capacity.
Ouch! This was one of the reasons why I went with striped mirrors, since you can resilver a new drive in just a few hours. With my current array in unRAID (4x 4 TB for data and 1x 4 TB for Parity) it takes about 18 hours to do a parity check, and I will be adding 2x 4 TB in soon
For the home user it might not seem like such a big deal, but you lose all your kids pictures, you will wish you had the extra parity drive.
This is why all my irreplaceable stuff goes in the cloud. I trust Google with my data more than I do myself, considering they're never made me lose a file but I've lost TBs due to my own dumb fault haha. All my pictures are on Google Drive/Google Photos and Facebook.