JBOD / Single / Individual Disks

[eliminatrix]

Hi All,

Absolutely brand-spanking-new to Freenas and from what I can see, the answer is no :(
I have a box that I'm turning into a NAS / plex box. It has 8 hard drives all of varying sizes. 6TB - 10TB. I've read through a PDF for Freenas and I'd like to add the drives as single, individual disks - No RAID whatsoever. How can I do that? The only options I have when creating a pool are all RAID options.
The hard drives are connected to the motherboard as well as a 4-port SATA PCI-E card.
How can I do this? Is it even possible?

Thanks!

 

[jgreco]

You can do it, but without redundancy, most of the benefits of ZFS are lost, and you might be better off going with a standard low-end NASware that caters to this. ZFS and FreeNAS are resource-intensive because they intend to provide redundancy in the event of failure.

 

[eliminatrix]

What's a different NAS software I could use then?

 

[eliminatrix]

You can do it, but without redundancy, most of the benefits of ZFS are lost, and you might be better off going with a standard low-end NASware that caters to this. ZFS and FreeNAS are resource-intensive because they intend to provide redundancy in the event of failure.

What's a different NAS software I could use then?

 

[blueether]

You could do a search on linux NAS software...

Can I ask why you don't want ANY reduncey? even with the 30 years of CD's that I have in boxes I would hate to have to re rip them all again.

 

[eliminatrix]

Thes

You could do a search on linux NAS software...

Can I ask why you don't want ANY reduncey? even with the 30 years of CD's that I have in boxes I would hate to have to re rip them all again.

These drives ARE my backups, the originals are in another computer. So I don't need any redundency for drives that are already backups

 

[Heracles]

Hey Eliminatrix,

You may read this post about the subject. Also, the fact that this copy of your data is a backup does not make it unworthy of security and availability. In fact, a single backup is good but a complete protection requires 3 copies...

So no redundancy is clearly possible, but not recommended.

 

[eliminatrix]

Any chance anyone would be willing to help me set up FreeNAS in the way I'm after please?

 

[Heracles]

Did you reviewed the post I linked to for you ? The basis of whatever solution you are looking for is in that post. From that post, what is your answer to the key question :
What are you ready to accept as the consequence of a single defective hard drive

Once you answered that one, you will know the basis for your solution.

If you still do not know how to achieve it, then tell us what is it that you are not understanding / can not do...

 

[eliminatrix]

Did you reviewed the post I linked to for you ? The basis of whatever solution you are looking for is in that post. From that post, what is your answer to the key question :
What are you ready to accept as the consequence of a single defective hard drive

Once you answered that one, you will know the basis for your solution.

If you still do not know how to achieve it, then tell us what is it that you are not understanding / can not do...

Yes, I did read YOUR post and it wasn't helpful in the slightest. It wasn't a post that gave directions or assistance in setup / configuring Freenas. It was an opinion post with nothing at all. I don't even know why you bothered to link it to me in the first place.

 

[eliminatrix]

Did you reviewed the post I linked to for you ? The basis of whatever solution you are looking for is in that post. From that post, what is your answer to the key question :
What are you ready to accept as the consequence of a single defective hard drive

Once you answered that one, you will know the basis for your solution.

If you still do not know how to achieve it, then tell us what is it that you are not understanding / can not do...

You've basically comes across as...."this is my opinion - anyone else's is wrong."

 

[Heracles]

There are many ways of not doing redundancy in FreeNAS. If you can not tell us which one you are looking for, we can not tell you how to achieve that one.

Good luck shooting yourself in the foot and may you lose even a leg in the process...

 

[eliminatrix]

There are many ways of not doing redundancy in FreeNAS. If you can not tell us which one you are looking for, we can not tell you how to achieve that one.

Good luck shooting yourself in the foot and may you lose even a leg in the process...

I'm not looking for any redundancy whatsoever. I just want the drives to appear as single, individual disks. I don't want any RAID of any kind.
Thanks.

 

[Heracles]

Yes, you already mentioned that. What you did not mention is if you are looking for a single pool (lose everything when first drive will fail) or multiple pools (lose whatever was on that defective hard drive).

So again, what are you ready to accept as the consequence of a single failed drive : you accept to lose it all or you accept to lose only what was on that failed drive ?

 

[eliminatrix]

Yes, you already mentioned that. What you did not mention is if you are looking for a single pool (lose everything when first drive will fail) or multiple pools (lose whatever was on that defective hard drive).

So again, what are you ready to accept as the consequence of a single failed drive : you accept to lose it all or you accept to lose only what was on that failed drive ?

lose only what was on that failed drive

 

[eliminatrix]

I'm assuming I just create individual pools for each hard drive?

 

[blueether]

Then you just greate single (striped) pools of each disk...

I too am of the opinion that this IS NOT the best use of 8 disks, but the choice is yours

 

[Heracles]

lose only what was on that failed drive

I'm assuming I just create individual pools for each hard drive?

Exactly. To configure in a way that you have no redundancy at all and to limit the consequence of a failed drive to its own content, every drive must be in a single drive vdev and each of them must be the sole vdev in its own pool.

So create pool "Naked_Disk_01" and create a vDev for it with only first drive.
Then you create pool "Naked_Disk_02" and create a second vDev with only disk no 2.

You keep going all the way down.

You will end up with as many pools as you have drives. The day a drive fails, that pool will be gone and its entire content, but not what will be in the other pools.

Not recommended but that is the basis you are looking for.

 

[jgreco]

Good luck shooting yourself in the foot and may you lose even a leg in the process...

[Mod scolding:] Let's not wish harm on anyone's data, 'k?

 

[allischalmersman]

Sorry to bump an old thread but I have a very specific use case for this request. My normal TrueNAS box is running a pool of Z2. I'm thinking about building another box that I want to behave as JBOD with zero redundancy, but if a drive fails lose only the data on that drive. I understand the idea of created a 1 drive vdev / 1 vdev pool for every disk, but that can't be presented as a single SMB share can it? Ideally I would like to have all 36 drives sharable as an SMB share but data not be striped across the drives so that on failure I only lose what was on that drive. I am a long time UnRAID user prior to coming onto TrueNAS and I can do exactly what I'm looking to do via UnRAID but it has limits on the number of disks in the array and / or cache pool. Thanks for any help,