RAIDZ2 2TB + 2TB + 3TB + 3TB

[seojoseph]

Reading from here: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Hardware_Recommendations

Hardware - HP MicroServer Gen8
2GB of RAM - I ordered 8GB stick which will put me at 10GB.
Installed 2TB WD Red in SATA 3 Drive One.

I have FreeNAS installed and running. I have not assigned my hard drive to the ZFS or UFS - Just getting looking around the interface. I have 2 SATA III and 2 SATA II controllers to be used here. The question is this:

• Do all the drives need to be the same size? i.e. if I do 2TB + 2TB + 3TB + 3TB - would that work for a raidz2?
• in the raidz2 does it add any limitations as far as speed since drive 3 and 4 are SATA II?
• Im pretty excited to play with this now - what steps would need to be taken to change UFS -> ZFS. I just want to play with the plugins and won't really put anything on here worth keeping. is it a pain in the butt to change?

Thanks in advance.

 

[ser_rhaegar]

1. Yes but each drive would give you 2TB of storage. So in Z2 you would see 4TB usable. If you ever replaced the first two drives with 3TB drives (one at a time to allow resilvering) then you could unlock the extra TB in your original 3TB drives for 6TB usable.

2. Short of using SSDs you won't see a difference from drive bays 3 and 4. Not to mention your bottleneck will be the two LAN ports (my Gen8 maxes them with 4x4TB).

3. You'd need to backup your data, wipe the volume and start over. Fairly easy. Just remember to backup your data first.

 

[seojoseph]

1. Yes but each drive would give you 2TB of storage. So in Z2 you would see 4TB usable. If you ever replaced the first two drives with 3TB drives (one at a time to allow resilvering) then you could unlock the extra TB in your original 3TB drives for 6TB usable.

OK, so it kind of feature proofs it. Hmm, might need to budget and buy the 4TB drives then. Kind of screwed myself buying the x2 2TB drives. I'm coming from a 1TB NAS that was at 80% then died. :( Mostly media but still #fml

2. Short of using SSDs you won't see a difference from drive bays 3 and 4. Not to mention your bottleneck will be the two LAN ports (my Gen8 maxes them with 4x4TB).

Hmm. So you have two gigabit eth plugged in? Why? Thanks for jumping in here ( fellow gen8 user :) )

3. You'd need to backup your data, wipe the volume and start over. Fairly easy. Just remember to backup your data first.

Fair enough!

 

[ser_rhaegar]

Depending on your switch, you can bond the two ports together using LACP. This allows multiple conversations on the network to be split between the NICs (roughly). So you could hit almost 2Gbs of transfer (not to the same connection, each connection would cap at 1Gbps) with multiple connections to the system.

If you are using iSCSI though you won't want to use LACP. You would use MPIO instead. Each adapter would stay separate with their own IP.

I use LACP as I have multiple systems connecting via AFP and NFS to my FreeNAS box.