New build drive configuration

[dwschoon]

We just finished a storage upgrade, and I want to build a freenas box with the pulled drives. These are the hardware specs for the system I want to build off of.

Intel 3420gplx board w/6 sata ports
Xeon X3440
32gb ECC ram
3Ware 9650SE-4LPML in JBOD mode

Drives on hand
WD RE4 2tb x 6
WD RE4 1tb x 12
WD RE3 1tb x 5
Dell sata 1tb x 5

I bought an LSI 9211-8i to add to the system. I have read conflicting opinions on the 3ware card. Can I use it, or do i need to grab another 9211? I had originally planned to use as many of the 1tb as i could in 1 RaidZ2, but after much reading about vdevs and pools, I'm wondering if the following is the best approach, or even sanctioned.

VDEV1 RaidZ2 RE4 2tb x 6
VDEV2 RaidZ2 RE4 1tb x 6
VDEV3 RaidZ2 RE4 1tb x 6
Shelve the remaining drives.

 

[Nick2253]

I can't comment on the 3ware card, but as far as the drives go, you could add a forth VDEV with 5x RE3 and 1x Dell drives (there's really no problem with different drives in the same VDEV).

Another option might be do organize the drives a little differently: do one pool (like your backup pool) with 6x 2TB drives, and then do 1 pool with two vdevs: two 11x 1TB RAIDZ3 vdevs. That would give you around 8TB in pool1, and around 16TB in pool2.

If you want to do VM storage, or some other high I/O use case, you might think about doing stripped mirrors with the 1TB drives. That would give you ~11TB in pool2, but very high I/O. If you were to go that route, you'd want to keep utilization under 50% or so anyway, so you would be able to easily backup to pool1.

Anyway, there are lots of option. It really depends on what you want to accomplish.

 

[dwschoon]

I should have specified the use case. This is going to be a low use file server for time machine, Lightroom/Photoshop backups, documents, and Blu Ray rips. I would like to run plex on it as well. Currently the system is running the 6 2tb drives in Raid10 with Server 2012R2. I have a file server vm in Hyper-V running the plex server, another running as a domain controller, and a Blu-Ray drive that i use with MakeMKV to rip my collection. I would like to migrate all of that to freenas and add the storage. If i can saturate a 1gb nic i would be happy.

edit. I don't want to migrate the VMs themselves, just their roles.

 

[Nick2253]

You can use Samba as a domain controller, but I'll be honest: Windows does it best.

I'm not sure how the Blu-Ray drive will handle with FreeNAS. You may be able to pass it through to a jail, but I've never done anything like that before, and I can't think of anyone here who's done it (though that doesn't mean people haven't done it here).

With 6x 2TB drives in RAIDZ2, you'll easily be able to saturate a 1G link. Everything else would just be icing on the cake.

If you are doing jails, running a separate pool with a couple stripped mirrors might make sense: it would allow your jails to run faster, and any data transfer that happens wouldn't impact the jail's performance.