Need help configuring drives

[Jon Fairbanks]

I want to setup a home server for all of my media.

I have an empty 2TB, and empty 1TB and a "full" 2TB.

Can't I make a "pool" of my drives so that it shows as a 3TB drive?

Eventually I would like to move all my large drives to my server, and have a 6TB or so area to store files. It would be two 2TB drives, a 1.5TB drive and a 1TB drive.

Is that possible? Thanks a lot!

 

[praecorloth]

You're looking for a spanned array. FreeNAS may be able to do it. Enough people refer to spanned arrays as JBOD that it makes it hard to tell whether FreeNAS can do it or not. Frankly, I've never seen the option for either spanned or JBOD in FreeNAS. But I've seen some posts that suggests "JBOD" (for whatever JBOD actually means in reference to the posts I've seen) is possible. But people are loathe to answer how it's done. Likely because drives will fail, and in either a JBOD or a spanned array, loss of a disk means loss of data.

On the RAID side of the coin, it's irritating to buy up a bunch of drive space, only to lose a certain portion of that space to a RAID's parity.

On the JBOD/Spanned array side of the coin, it's maddening to get your server and data to a point where it's easy and convenient for you to access it, only to lose a drive and have to futz with restoring from backups, and getting your data back to where it should be. Usually just in time for the next drive to die.

Pick your poison. :)

 

[Jon Fairbanks]

So what is a ZFS pool then? I don't understand the pool term. So I guess then my guestion would be.... why don't I load a copy of XP and just mount and share all the drives? It would gain me more space. I just don't feel like I have that many data problems with my media that I can justify a couple hundred dollar backup drive?

 

[Kimba]

A quick definition of a ZFS Pool is similar to a Raid device in that data can be spanned across multiple hard drives to ensure redundancy or multiple drives can be used to form a giant storage area without redundancy. The difference between a ZFS and a traditional raid is that ZFS does not require the hard drives to be the same size while a raid requires basically the same model.

For example a ZFS pool of 3 1 TB HD in a RaidZ1 configuration will give you 1.8 TB of storage with redundancy in that if one drive fails you will not lose any data. From Windows you will see it as 1.8 TB.

If you wish to reduce the Pool into smaller units you can make DataSets and thereby have smaller portions of the 1.8 TB in logical drives.

I hope that helps somewhat.

 

[StephenFry]

I just don't feel like I have that many data problems with my media that I can justify a couple hundred dollar backup drive?

You only have to have a "data problem" once and that couple hundred dollars will seem like it's nothing.

 

[praecorloth]

So I guess then my guestion would be.... why don't I load a copy of XP and just mount and share all the drives? It would gain me more space. I just don't feel like I have that many data problems with my media that I can justify a couple hundred dollar backup drive?

You could go that route with XP or FreeNAS. You could share each drive individually and use 100% of the space available to you. The reason people on this forum advise against that is because there is no redundancy for your data. "Data problems," is a term that barely scratches the surface of what we get concerned about. Consider your full 2TB drive. Imagine if something happened to that drive. Something goes wrong and suddenly neither the BIOS nor any OS you load on that computer can see that drive or the data on it. The data is just gone.

It sounds like you haven't had to deal much with dead hard drives in the past, and that's awesome. But the only thing you have to do to experience a drive failure is continue to use computers. It will happen eventually. Hard drives have moving parts that fail. Sectors go bad.

We don't mean to be bullying you here in to doing something you don't want to do. It's just that we see the occasional post on the forum here where someone has lost a large volume with tons of data in it, and it's very sadmaking when there's just nothing that can be done.