nôôb: Filesystems, shares and RAID-options

[unca_NAS]

As Im slowly setting my 1st NAS up (HP Proliant N36L Microserver, 4 x 2TB HD, 8 Gb RAM) I'n still somewhat puzzled which would be the best configuration (RAID 5 vs RAIDZ*, NFS vs CIFS shares) for me?
I'm hoping the final config to be::
- reasonably fast on transferring data
- more than reasonably reliable on saving the data
- relatively easy access
- option to expand the size of the vault (the server has eSata-plug - can it be used on expanding?)

The NAS is to serve primarly as a storage, since my media player (PCH-C200) can stream and play the media files. Other computers on the household are two Win7 laptops (1 x Enterprise with NFS client/server, 1 x Professional [no NFS] and a Android-phone) If the NAS can be easily set up as a torrent-client, fine, but thats not a necessity since the Transmission-client works on media-player too (although its dl speeds could be better)

When testing the transfer-speeds, CIFS works best when transforming data NAS <> laptop (60-70MB/s) and NFS between NAS and laptop performs about half of it. Transfer speeds between NAS <> PCH I haven't yet measured.

Appreciating any thoughts/pointers/ideas :)

 

[peterh]

What is the question ?

 

[unca_NAS]

What is the question ?

"I'm still somewhat puzzled which would be the best configuration (RAID 5 vs RAIDZ*, NFS vs CIFS shares) for me?"

 

[peterh]

raidz equals raid5. cifs is usually done with microsoft computers, nfs by unix or when more speed is needed.

Do read the freenas documentatio, it gives a fairly good primer on the subject.