Hi
Just installed freenas 8 to test it out I have never built one and have been using external drives to backup but would like a better solution. I have a few questions about the setup. I am prepared to have 3 separate raids if this is best. I plan on using my raid to store music, movies etc. I also need it to back my laptops/machines have 4 on my home network. Currently I have 3 WD black 2TD drives in a ZFS setup. I noticed you can only added larger drives to add space. I do not like this approach.
Can I not in the future buy 3 more 2TD drives and mirror the first volume. This means that 3 drives would need to fail on both arrays at the same time to lose all my data (2 in one array and 1 in the other one). As an added benefit read performance would also increase which would be a bonus. This configuration would support my music/movies. I can then build a third raid with 5 disks in a ZFS setup that would act as a backup device for my computers (means a total of 6 disks) 10TB of data. I am currently using an old dell studio as my NAS server it is slower but read/write performance is not an issue for my network backup but I will buy a faster machine for my music/movie server.
So does this plan make sense. Money is an issue and I think this allows me to grow the system as I get comfortable with it and see that it works.
Just installed freenas 8 to test it out I have never built one and have been using external drives to backup but would like a better solution. I have a few questions about the setup. I am prepared to have 3 separate raids if this is best. I plan on using my raid to store music, movies etc. I also need it to back my laptops/machines have 4 on my home network. Currently I have 3 WD black 2TD drives in a ZFS setup. I noticed you can only added larger drives to add space. I do not like this approach.
Can I not in the future buy 3 more 2TD drives and mirror the first volume. This means that 3 drives would need to fail on both arrays at the same time to lose all my data (2 in one array and 1 in the other one). As an added benefit read performance would also increase which would be a bonus. This configuration would support my music/movies. I can then build a third raid with 5 disks in a ZFS setup that would act as a backup device for my computers (means a total of 6 disks) 10TB of data. I am currently using an old dell studio as my NAS server it is slower but read/write performance is not an issue for my network backup but I will buy a faster machine for my music/movie server.
So does this plan make sense. Money is an issue and I think this allows me to grow the system as I get comfortable with it and see that it works.