R510 w/flashed it H310 12 drive volume setup?

[bss]

Finally getting around to building an R510 I have had for a while and looking for advice on volume setup.

Took me a while to get the H310 flashed, now I know some of the tricks and maybe I will build another....after I get this one up and running :D

R510 (12) drive populated with (12) 2.0TB SAS Seagate 3.5"s, (2) 2.4ghz Xeon's, 32gb ram

getting a little confused on the volume setup I should run with.

This is just to be used to replace a couple of 1.5TB Terastations along with backing up a few vm's on an esxi host. (after thinking about it, I think I might need to use larger drives and/or a secondary setup)

Storage is the main concern, with tolerance, not necessarily anything to do with speed as I have probably more than I need on it's face I would suspect, considering what I am using currently.

Should I go with a single 11 disk z2 with a spare or? (and cold spare/s on the shelf)

Thank you in advance for your suggestions.

 

[Mirfster]

How about 12 disk RaidZ3 then?

 

[bss]

How about 12 disk RaidZ3 then?

why would you suggest this over any other scenarios?

I am new to this ZFS scenario, trying to wrap my head around it.

From what I have read, once I create the vol, I am stuck with it, so you can back yourself in to a corner in terms of if you ever wanted to start swapping larger drives if you max the physical capacity out, no? that is the only thing, if it truly works like that, where I would want to think ahead...now if I go ahead and just have a spare r510 setup, I would just cram it with larger drives and move data and use that as the upgrade path....I don't really know what upgrade paths are available, methods and common practice but I have been reading what I can find...some of it kind of makes sense...lol

Thank you

 

[Mirfster]

Storage is the main concern, with tolerance, not necessarily anything to do with speed as I have probably more than I need on it's face I would suspect, considering what I am using currently.

Basically, you mentioned that you wanted space and tolerance (redundancy) over speed.

Should I go with a single 11 disk z2 with a spare or? (and cold spare/s on the shelf)

So while you are able to lose 2 drives in a RaidZ2 vDev; you are using the 12th (cold spare) as a sorta fail safe. Pretty much that will give you the raw space of 9 drives (two are allocated for redundancy)

Now, if you went with a RaidZ3 12 Disk vDev:

• That will still give you the raw space of 9 drives
• You will have 3 drive failure redundancy
• Will still be the same speed (IOPS) as a 11 drive RaidZ2; since it is a single vDev only in your Pool/Volume
• Not really much of a difference if you wanted to upgrade the drive sizes later since we are only talking one extra "Active" drive overall

Keep in mind my suggestion is solely based upon your requirement of desiring Space and Redundancy over Speed.

Hope this helps

P.S. There are some links in my sig ("Recommended Reading") that will help those new to FreeNAS. Feel free to take a gander if so inclined (I would suggest going from topmost down). ;)

 

[bss]

Basically, you mentioned that you wanted space and tolerance (redundancy) over speed.



So while you are able to lose 2 drives in a RaidZ2 vDev; you are using the 12th (cold spare) as a sorta fail safe. Pretty much that will give you the raw space of 9 drives (two are allocated for redundancy)

Now, if you went with a RaidZ3 12 Disk vDev:

• That will still give you the raw space of 9 drives
• You will have 3 drive failure redundancy
• Will still be the same speed (IOPS) as a 11 drive RaidZ2; since it is a single vDev only in your Pool/Volume
• Not really much of a difference if you wanted to upgrade the drive sizes later since we are only talking one extra "Active" drive overall

Keep in mind my suggestion is solely based upon your requirement of desiring Space and Redundancy over Speed.

Hope this helps

P.S. There are some links in my sig ("Recommended Reading") that will help those new to FreeNAS. Feel free to take a gander if so inclined (I would suggest going from topmost down). ;)

Works for me....and of course I saw a squirrel in your links....looking for a c2100... :D

Thank you

 

[Mirfster]

looking for a c2100

Make sure you read all the info so you don't get a sketchy part/component.

Happy hunting

 

[bss]

Make sure you read all the info so you don't get a sketchy part/component.

Happy hunting

I caught that, looks like around here, I would get out cheaper and easier with another R510 or similar 12 bay....

 

[Chris Moore]

I am new to this ZFS scenario, trying to wrap my head around it.

These links make good reading to help you understand:

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/

If you go with 2 vdevs of 6 drives each, it will give you more speed but less space. The upside is that you can replace just 6 drives to increase space instead of needing to replace all 12 drives to access the increased space. It is this scenario that is the cause of my main pool having one vdev of 2TB drives while the other vdev is 4TB drives.

 

[bss]

These links make good reading to help you understand:

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/

If you go with 2 vdevs of 6 drives each, it will give you more speed but less space. The upside is that you can replace just 6 drives to increase space instead of needing to replace all 12 drives to access the increased space. It is this scenario that is the cause of my main pool having one vdev of 2TB drives while the other vdev is 4TB drives.

That's what I had setup initially with my understanding at that point, then since I had a late night, I figured what the heck, post up and maybe see something when I woke up....Mirfster posted what my 'well why not this' secondary thought, but being new, wanted to see from the experts, any caveats or whatnot....still have my browser open from several hours ago from talking myself back and forth on these two scenarios....

the third scenario that I kind of mentioned was let's say I went 11 or 10 even, 1 or 2 hot spares, if I understood correctly, I could 'fail' a drive, force a spare in the mix, replace the 'failed' drive with a larger drive, let it rebuild, so on and so forth till they were all swapped, once all matched in the vdev, then I could claim the newly attainable space, but only after all were replaced with like....read something about that but I didn't come across more than a couple writeups on that so maybe it is fraught with peril or just a rarely used 'manipulation'...???

 

[Chris Moore]

It's just, maybe, my personal opinion but I think hot spares are a waste of hard drives. I keep cold spares and use the drive bay.
If a drive goes bad it's easy to remove a drive and replace it. If you just want to upgrade you can still remove a drive and replace it easy.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[bss]

It's just, maybe, my personal opinion but I think hot spares are a waste of hard drives. I keep cold spares and use the drive bay.
If a drive goes bad it's easy to remove a drive and replace it. If you just want to upgrade you can still remove a drive and replace it easy.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

yes, I see through that now. For some reason I was not fully understanding, thinking there was something different going on with this that I had not come across. It was late, I will blame it on that, technically it is still yesterday for me, sleep is for the weak...it really is :)

 

[Chris Moore]

read something about that but I didn't come across more than a couple writeups on that so maybe it is fraught with peril or just a rarely used 'manipulation'...???

No, it is not perilous or a rarely used manipulation. I started back around the end of 2011 with a pool of 6 x 1TB hard drives, then expanded that pool with a second vdev of 1TB hard drives, then upgraded one vdev from 1TB drives to 2TB drives followed about a year later by doing the same with the second vdev. Just a few months ago (around the end of 2017) I have upgraded the first vdev (vdev-0) from 2TB drives to 4TB drives and I am looking ahead to the time when I will upgrade vdev-1 to also be 4TB drives. It is as easy to replace a drive to increase capacity as it is to replace a failed drive. Which is to say there is a process and it is not a big deal as long as you do it right.