One more Z400 build

[ZiggyGT]

I see questions about some of this hardware but no feedback on how well the builds went
I want to build using a Z400 server with 12GB of ECC ram. This is a 4 core processor. I hoped to use the mother board SATA ports. 8GB USB for boot. I purchased 3 6TB Hitachi NAS drives. From the hardware config this seemed workable for a home video server. I want to run PLEX plugin.

Will the Z400 SATA ports support the 6TB drives? I see that the power bill will be a little high with this processor but it seems like it can handle the cpu load. Any suggestions or alerts.
I think this CPU still uses FSB but I am not going to load it too heavy. Any issues besides slower performance
What utility do you use to test the drives?
How should I configure the backup? I was thinking 2 drive mirror with local backup or a 3 drive config that I do notunderstand yet

thanks for any advice and tips. I have read many of the docs, but my head is still spinning.

 

[Chris Moore]

The reason nobody answered you on this is because we have a whole resources section of the forum with advice on hardware. You would do well to read before you build because you are suggesting several things in your post that are already covered in the guides that have been written for the very purpose of answering questions like this.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/freenas®-quick-hardware-guide.7/

 

[ZiggyGT]

I will read again. Thanks for the post

 

[Chris Moore]

Will the Z400 SATA ports support the 6TB drives?

The 6TB drives should not be a problem, one of the problems is the number of drives you have suggested.
For 6TB drives (any drive over 1TB actually) the advice of the experts is to use RAID-z2, for which you need a minimum of 4 drives.

 

[ZiggyGT]

The 6TB drives should not be a problem, one of the problems is the number of drives you have suggested.
For 6TB drives (any drive over 1TB actually) the advice of the experts is to use RAID-z2, for which you need a minimum of 4 drives.

Thanks for the feedback. I had used the spreadsheet calculator and saw the three drive configuration with Raid-z1 (as I remember) looked to me to be an economical choice. cost/reliability. Yes I saw the "just say no z1 posts' but there are always alarmists. I do not like WD drives and the Hitachi's were on sale so I picked the 7200rpm drives against the recommendation. I will have this in my basement so I do not care that the Hitachis drives are noisy. Another drive will be $200 more now. What is the downside to the three drive config?.

I have been using appliance NAS with 2x1TB and 2x2TB drives Dlink 321's they are too small and I worry of the ability to swap out a drive because the firmware supports only certain drives. My thinking is that FreeNAS would remain flexible as drive technology evolves because it is not driven by a puny CPU with fixed firmware. I have already spent more than I should have on the drives. the Z400 supports up to 6 cores and with 12GB of ECC ram I am incompliance with the 1GB/TB rule. I thought I followed the rules.

 

[Chris Moore]

Thanks for the feedback. I had used the spreadsheet calculator and saw the three drive configuration with Raid-z1 (as I remember) looked to me to be an economical choice. cost/reliability. Yes I saw the "just say no z1 posts' but there are always alarmists. I do not like WD drives and the Hitachi's were on sale so I picked the 7200rpm drives against the recommendation. I will have this in my basement so I do not care that the Hitachis drives are noisy. Another drive will be $200 more now. What is the downside to the three drive config?.

I have been using appliance NAS with 2x1TB and 2x2TB drives Dlink 321's they are too small and I worry of the ability to swap out a drive because the firmware supports only certain drives. My thinking is that FreeNAS would remain flexible as drive technology evolves because it is not driven by a puny CPU with fixed firmware. I have already spent more than I should have on the drives. the Z400 supports up to 6 cores and with 12GB of ECC ram I am incompliance with the 1GB/TB rule. I thought I followed the rules.

Those NAS appliances you mentioned are not as reliable, you already know that and it is part of the reason you are moving to something better.
If the drives are new it might not be a big problem, but only having one drive of redundancy is a data safety issue. If you have one drive go bad, and while that drive is being replaced, another drive fails, then you lost your whole array.
Where I work, I manage several storage servers and in those systems we not only run with two drives of redundancy (RAID-z2) we also have a hot spare in the system so it can automatically start the rebuild process and we have cold spares on the shelf in our IT cabinet. I am not suggesting that much redundancy, but the idea of having two drives dedicated to redundancy is about protecting your data while you are replacing a failed drive. I recently had to replace a 6TB WD Red Pro drive in a server at work that was only about half full of data and it took about three (3) days to rebuild the drive from the parity data in the pool. In a RAID-z1 pool, that is three days of time where another failure will fail the pool and loose your data. You probably wouldn't leave all the doors and windows of your house open for three days straight as a precaution against burglars, why would you leave your data unprotected? If you had asked for suggestions prior to making a purchase, I would have suggested the Seagate 4TB drives that are even less expensive and use six of them in RAID-z2.
As to the expense, it is something you should be able to use for as much as 5 years before it needs to be replaced and even then you might only need to put new drives in. You should plan to replace drives around the 5 year mark due to the wear on the drives making them increasingly unreliable as they age.

 

[ZiggyGT]

Those NAS appliances you mentioned are not as reliable, you already know that and it is part of the reason you are moving to something better.
If the drives are new it might not be a big problem, but only having one drive of redundancy is a data safety issue. If you have one drive go bad, and while that drive is being replaced, another drive fails, then you lost your whole array.
Where I work, I manage several storage servers and in those systems we not only run with two drives of redundancy (RAID-z2) we also have a hot spare in the system so it can automatically start the rebuild process and we have cold spares on the shelf in our IT cabinet. I am not suggesting that much redundancy, but the idea of having two drives dedicated to redundancy is about protecting your data while you are replacing a failed drive. I recently had to replace a 6TB WD Red Pro drive in a server at work that was only about half full of data and it took about three (3) days to rebuild the drive from the parity data in the pool. In a RAID-z1 pool, that is three days of time where another failure will fail the pool and loose your data. You probably wouldn't leave all the doors and windows of your house open for three days straight as a precaution against burglars, why would you leave your data unprotected? If you had asked for suggestions prior to making a purchase, I would have suggested the Seagate 4TB drives that are even less expensive and use six of them in RAID-z2.
As to the expense, it is something you should be able to use for as much as 5 years before it needs to be replaced and even then you might only need to put new drives in. You should plan to replace drives around the 5 year mark due to the wear on the drives making them increasingly unreliable as they age.

Chris,
I saw this post as well. So may 3 drives will work but have less security. perhaps not less that the current appliances Icam using. I had a raid compatible motherboard a long time ago. it was a disaster when the motherboard died and data was lost. I have 2 x Dlink 321 so a controller will not lose all the data. these are simple raid 0 with very poor performance, after spending days reorganizing things I decided I wanted a single NAS instead of 3 little ones. I will see how it goes. I appreciate the descrption of data security and will continue to evaluate before I put the pools to use. Thanks.

form another thread:

The problem isn't with the amount of disks. It has to do with how the data is written to the disks. Without going into large discussion about why (which is very technical), let me just give you the optimal disk count formula:

RAID-Z1 = 2^n + 1 Disks. IE. 3,5,9
RAID-Z2 = 2^n + 2 Disks. IE. 4,6,10
RAID-Z3 = 2^n + 3 Disks. IE. 5,7,11

Going beyond 9,10 or 11 disks (for the respective RAID-Zx) IIRC, is not recommended considering the increased possibility of multi-disk failure which would result in an unrecoverable volume.

You can use disks in other configurations but those are the optimal if you want the best possible performance (speed wise).

 

[Inxsible]

For 6TB drives (any drive over 1TB actually) the advice of the experts is to use RAID-z2, for which you need a minimum of 4 drives.

You can always use mirrors and keep adding mirror vdevs as long as your case has space. No need for RAIDZ2.

 

[Chris Moore]

You can always use mirrors and keep adding mirror vdevs as long as your case has space. No need for RAIDZ2.

I don't have any objection to mirror vdevs except for the inefficient use of capacity, high cost, and lower redundancy; but those are not really factors until you get to 4 drives and more.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[Inxsible]

I don't have any objection to mirror vdevs except for the inefficient use of capacity, high cost, and lower redundancy; but those are not really factors until you get to 4 drives and more.

Fair enough, but in my opinion, hard drives are cheap and getting cheaper. The amount of time it saves during resilvering a mirror vs any RAIDZ configuration where additional drives could fail is more than enough to compensate for the 50% loss in space. Plus, I can have different sized vdevs and only buy 2 at a time instead of a minimum of 4 in a RAIDZ2 setup. That saves money too when purchasing drives.

 

[Chris Moore]

It is just a different perspective. I planned my capacity for a particular purpose and have been working the plan for almost 3 years already. The last expansion, in terms of adding disks was when I went from 6 disks to 12 in the primary NAS a couple years ago. Before that it was the build of a backup NAS with 12 drives to start. This year, I replaced six of my 2TB drives with 4TB drives. The next expansion will be to add the 6 x 2TB drives left from the replace in the primary NAS as an additional vdev in the backup NAS. I will repeat that as soon as I can afford another set of 4TB disks. The plan being to have one NAS with 12 x 4TB drives and the other with 24 x 2TB drives. It absolutely is more expensive to deal with that many disks, but I have a plan.