Possible to use individual drives, instead of pooled?

[emraith]

I currently have a single PC that has Windows server 2012R2 installed and acts primarily as a file server along with 2 Win7 machines running in Hyper-V. I'm wanting to move things around to separate out the file server and VM, thinking I can use FreeNAS and ESXi, on 2 separate boxes instead. The current system I have would remain as my ESXi box(i5-2500, 32GB RAM, Dual NIC), this machine fully works with ESXi as I ran it this way in the past.

I currently use StableBit DrivePool in Windows Server to allow me to bunch all of my various drives together. If one drive has bad sectors, starts to fail, acts weird...whatever, I'm only losing those files, or worse case, the data on that drive. This software also gives the option to backup select folders to multiple drives, which is what I am currently doing for my actual files that I care about. I also run crashplan, and backup the important data to an external USB drive.

For FreeNAS, I want to say first of all that majority of my data being stored is not critical. It would be an inconvenience if it was lost, but it would more or less just be a 'well..that sucks' feeling. This has not been an issue with my current setup which I've been using in various configurations over the past years.

I guess this rambled story gets me back to my question.. Could I add drives to FreeNAS individually, so that if something was to fail with the drive, memory(Non-ECC), etc, I would only lose the data on that drive, and not everything? I understand that FreeNAS is not created for this purpose, and it may be that my current way of doing things means I may be better off keeping a system on Windows and running the file share through there, as I currently am.

Thanks for any advice or suggestions you guys may have!

 

[danb35]

Yes, in two possible ways (for now):

1. Set up individual UFS volumes with your drives. This is the "for now" option, since when 9.3 is released, support for UFS is said to be going away. It probably isn't a good idea, but it will do what you're asking.
2. Set up single-disk ZFS pools. Using ZFS, you will always have at least one pool, but there's nothing keeping you from creating more than one pool, and there's no requirement that a pool contain more than one disk. You won't have any redundancy, of course, and you'll be fighting ZFS's design, but it should work fine within those limits.

 

[emraith]

If I was to setup single-disk ZFS pools, would that mean if 1 block of data was to get corrupt, it would corrupt the whole drive, or would it still just be that single file/files within that block? And would doing this cause any additional overhead for system requirements?

 

[cyberjock]

The only thing i'll add to danb35s comments is that if you are using non-ECC RAM and it fails any pool being used is basically going to be trashed. So if you have 100 single disk ZFS pools, all of the pools would likely be lost forever.

 

[emraith]

Alright so that clears it up, so even without pooling the drives, using non-ECC means I'm taking a risk of not just my physical drives causing a problem, but just throwing memory in there as a possible point of failure too. I think FreeNAS isn't the fit for what I'm looking to do then. Thanks for the advice and quick answers.

 

[cyberjock]

Here's a hint: Every computer and file system out there, if it's using non-ECC RAM and the RAM fails, you'll lose the file system. So this shouldn't be "news" to anyone that's an IT Pro.