qwertymodo
Contributor
- Joined
- Apr 7, 2014
- Messages
- 144
I'm in the process of my first FreeNAS build, and I'm about ready to order drives, but I want to figure out the configuration I want before I drop a bunch of money onto the most expensive part of the project. I'm currently a college student paying my way through out of pocket, so I don't exactly have the budget to go all out on 6x4TB enterprise-grade drives, but I also understand that I can't just add a drive at a time into a ZFS setup, so some planning at this stage is probably called for. My current build is based around the ASUS C60M1-I with 16GB RAM in a chassis that supports up to 6 drives.
From the looks of things, RAIDZ2 would likely be the best choice, but as I said, money is a bit tight, and 6 drives is probably out of the question right now. So what I was thinking was to go with 3 drives in a RAIDZ configuration, then later I could add the additional 3 drives as a separate vdev. If I understand correctly, this would also later allow me to expand each vdev independently by replacing 3 drives, rather than having to replace all 6 like I would have to in a 6-drive RAIDZ2 configuration. The obvious downside to this is that losing 2 drives in the same vdev would kill the whole pool, but therein lies the eternal struggle between capacity, reliability, and cost. Personally, where I'm at right now, I'm okay with single failure protection, as I'll probably be stuck with the 3 initial drives for the forseeable future anyway, and even that is at least more failure protection than I have right now on my laptop and scattered collection of external USB hard drives. This NAS is primarily going to be used as a backup server for my existing data, and it's just for me, so it's not going to see a lot of heavy use.
I understand that drive configuration is a subjective topic, but I'm a bit overwhelmed with all of the information I've read as I've been getting into this project, so I just figured I'd ask for some feedback. Is my current plan any good, or is it guaranteed to blow up in my face? I'd appreciate any comments, suggestions, criticisms, etc. I think right now my drive budget is about $350, so I'm currently looking at 3x2TB WD Red drives, which are currently running $110 at Tiger Direct, and then configuring them as RAIDZ like I mentioned earlier.
From the looks of things, RAIDZ2 would likely be the best choice, but as I said, money is a bit tight, and 6 drives is probably out of the question right now. So what I was thinking was to go with 3 drives in a RAIDZ configuration, then later I could add the additional 3 drives as a separate vdev. If I understand correctly, this would also later allow me to expand each vdev independently by replacing 3 drives, rather than having to replace all 6 like I would have to in a 6-drive RAIDZ2 configuration. The obvious downside to this is that losing 2 drives in the same vdev would kill the whole pool, but therein lies the eternal struggle between capacity, reliability, and cost. Personally, where I'm at right now, I'm okay with single failure protection, as I'll probably be stuck with the 3 initial drives for the forseeable future anyway, and even that is at least more failure protection than I have right now on my laptop and scattered collection of external USB hard drives. This NAS is primarily going to be used as a backup server for my existing data, and it's just for me, so it's not going to see a lot of heavy use.
I understand that drive configuration is a subjective topic, but I'm a bit overwhelmed with all of the information I've read as I've been getting into this project, so I just figured I'd ask for some feedback. Is my current plan any good, or is it guaranteed to blow up in my face? I'd appreciate any comments, suggestions, criticisms, etc. I think right now my drive budget is about $350, so I'm currently looking at 3x2TB WD Red drives, which are currently running $110 at Tiger Direct, and then configuring them as RAIDZ like I mentioned earlier.