New to FreeNAS. Best solution for small Home NAS

[CJDK]

Hi Forum.

Iam setting up my first FreeNAS for home use.
Backup Pictures and data.
Storage movies.
HW is HP Microserver G8
Xeon E3-1265L V2 16GB ram
There is room for 4 disks
Disks:
2X WD Red NAS 8TB
1X WD Red NAS 5TB
I can't afford more drives right now, but still possibility to upgrade later would be great.

Should I just put the 2x8 TB in one Vdev running mirror and 5 TB in another vdev for non important data?

Or Should I Stripe the 2X8TB and get 16GB now and backup important data to the 5GB in separate VDev
And in the hopefully near future buy 2X8 TB more and make a vdev with them in stripe.
And then join them in one Zpool in mirror.
Is this possible and a good solution?

Or perhaps put them all in one vdev in RAIDZ and getting 10TB? until I replace the 5GB with a 8TB and get 16TB?

Thanks
CJDK

 

[styno]

How should we know how important your data is (and how much space you'd need)?

That being said, if it was me and the data wasn't that important, I still would not stripe.
I just can't justify the amount of time I have to spend by losing a pool to a stupid single hdd failure.

If it was me, I would sell the 8's and buy more 5's (or vice-versa) and setup a raidz2 pool.

 

[CJDK]

OK I see your point.
I can live with RAIDZ -allowing one disk to fail. But is it possible create a Vdev with drives of different sizes? I think I know the tradeoff will be that all disks will be seen same size as the smallest (5GB) then later swap the 5GB for a new 8TB?

 

[styno]

What are your space requirements and how many drives can your system handle?

 

[CJDK]

There is room for 4 drives. 16TB is fine,

 

[SweetAndLow]

Create a mirror with the 2 drives. Wait until you can afford more drives and extend your pool with another mirror. That is what I would do for the best storage capacity and redundcy.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[CJDK]

Hi.
I end up with the 2X8Tb in mirror.
I also made some jails:
Unifi controler
Urbackup (perhaps I should go for Crashplan)
Nextcloud

 

[Zofoor]

You could also create a Raidz1 with the 3 disks and obtain 10Tb usable. Later you could upgrade the 5 TB disk to a 8Tb disk and so upgrade your space to 16 TB.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

[SweetAndLow]

You could also create a Raidz1 with the 3 disks and obtain 10Tb usable. Later you could upgrade the 5 TB disk to a 8Tb disk and so upgrade your space to 16 TB.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

Highly not recommended to run raid z1 with that large of disk. Single parity solutions have been dead for 10y.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[CJDK]

Yes.
I will sell my 5 TB disk, and wait for the 8 TB mirror getting full. Then I will look for 2 new disks. - Perhaps I get 10 TB or more at that time.
Thanks