Intro for slapshot5

[slapshot5]

Hello all,

After reading some of the other introductions, I think the following is the best way to introduce myself.

I'm a wannabe home-labber at this point. FreeBSD since 4.4. I currently do Virtual Machines on my Ryzen workstation. Day-to-day stuff on MBP. 99.5% Windows free. Currently running FreeNAS 11.3 in a VM for testing and evaluation. Love what I am seeing so far!

I'm looking at doing a proper build for a FreeNAS box. Hardware ideas are (hopefully...) in my signature. Most hardware recommendations I'm seeing are Intel-based - which is great. My build will be AMD-based. Uses will be 1) to host virtual machines, 2) host services like Plex, 3) AFP/NFS storage shares, 4) On-site backups for laptop/workstation. Uber important documents will be backed up to the cloud (probably Google Cloud Storage at this point).

My current storage solution is a fairly old Seagate Business NAS. It never worked the best, and I don't trust it 100%. But it does host some file shares, store some backups, and I guess the streaming media thing works (or worked at one point). But, given my FreeBSD history, I lack control over that system. So, building my own FreeNAS system is probably overkill, but it sounds like fun, and has features I will definitely make use of.

Open to pretty much any feedback, especially around drive/ZFS pool configuration and snapshotting strategy.

Thanks for reading!

-slapshot5

 

[Kris Moore]

Welcome to the party!

Build looks pretty good, only thing a bit weird is a 4-disk raidz2. I'd probably just do mirrors, 2x2 in that case, so you can expand later with another 2 disks.

 

[slapshot5]

I'd probably just do mirrors, 2x2 in that case, so you can expand later with another 2 disks.

Does that means I'd have pool0 on mirror0 (disk0 and disk1) AND pool1 on mirror1 (disk2 and disk3)? Or, I think I would be able to just assign both mirrors to the same pool. ZFS doesn't care what's underneath?

 

[Kris Moore]

It'd be a single pool, with two mirrored vdevs:

pool0 -
vdev0 - mirror (disk0, disk1)
vdev1 - mirror(disk2, disk3)

That would give you the same 8TB usable space, but down the road you could add two more disks for 'vdev2 - disk4,disk5' and grow to 12TB if needed.