Recommendation for storage setup - Storage + iscsi

[fjortisbart]

Hello.

I have been running my freenas server at home with 4x4tb WD red in raidz for a few years now and have been very happy with it.
Im now in the process of upgrading it to newer hardware. Im looking for some hints on how to archive the best performance out of my hardware.

The new box is socket 2011 xeon, with support for plenty of ram. So im planning on setting it up with 128gb or 192gb.
I have 2x LSI 2008 cards + 4 slots on the motherboard for disks.
It also have dual port sfp+ card, for 10gbe network. I was planning on setting up 1 lancard for vmware with mtu 9000 and let the other be my "lan" card that connects to the rest of the workstations.

Server is going to be used primarly for storing mediafiles, copied from my workstation. This also includes hosting a couple of shares for various machines in the house. Usual smb and nfs traffic.
Here i was planning on using the 4x4tb drives in an raid10ish setup with 2 mirrors striped. Is this a good idea? Or do you think raidz is better for this?
Scalability with the mirrors seems like the best idea, and since these drives have been spinning for a few years, i think i need the redundance.

For vmware, i was thinking of using an raid0 setup with 2x1tb drives and do backups of it instead. This is for maximum speed.
Or should i just go with the iscsi file on the other raid?


I have these hardware available to use:
4x WD red
2x 1tb Seagate SAS enterprise drives.
8x 500gb Samsung ( old, but not used much )

Can also buy a few new drives. If i for instance need ssd caching or maybe do 2x ssd raid0 for vmware.


This system wont be critical at all, i just like to fiddle with this at home. But i want to get the best setup possible,
I have been googling this alot, but cannot find any usecase that is simular to mine.

 

[sretalla]

You could think about 4 mirrors of 500GB with the samsungs to give you a decent pool of IOPS (or even go to the extreme risk of an 8-way striped pool with no redundancy, then consider a local replication task to one of the other pools to ensure you don't lose much if a disk gives up).

Then use the SAS disks in Mirror (target for the replication?) and RAIDZ1 for the Reds for biggest storage (for all your other stuff... you said nothing critical, hence me saying RAIDZ1... normally that's not recommended for disks over 2GB, but you only have 4 of them, so I guess you would accept the risk or buy a 5th and have RAIDZ2 if you wanted that).

You could consider adding a SSD SLOG for the higher IOPS pool to make your iSCSI perform better. (although with your proposed RAM config, should already be pretty good).

 

[Chris Moore]

8x 500gb Samsung ( old, but not used much )

SSDs?

2x 1tb Seagate SAS enterprise drives.

Probably not worth the trouble. Just put them on eBay.

 

[fjortisbart]

SSDs?

Probably not worth the trouble. Just put them on eBay.

No the 500gb are old SATA drives that I had lying around after and old datahorder project. Just thought I could use them to get up iops. But maybe not worth the trouble.

 

[fjortisbart]

You could think about 4 mirrors of 500GB with the samsungs to give you a decent pool of IOPS (or even go to the extreme risk of an 8-way striped pool with no redundancy, then consider a local replication task to one of the other pools to ensure you don't lose much if a disk gives up).

Then use the SAS disks in Mirror (target for the replication?) and RAIDZ1 for the Reds for biggest storage (for all your other stuff... you said nothing critical, hence me saying RAIDZ1... normally that's not recommended for disks over 2GB, but you only have 4 of them, so I guess you would accept the risk or buy a 5th and have RAIDZ2 if you wanted that).

You could consider adding a SSD SLOG for the higher IOPS pool to make your iSCSI perform better. (although with your proposed RAM config, should already be pretty good).

Think I have to test this setup, see how it performs. Still waiting for some parts in the mail. Hopefully the 8x500gb won't make too much heat.
Right now I'm running everything out of the raidz, it works but its kinda slow. Specially the VMware machines notice. But the mainboard I'm using now lacks enough pcilanes.

Any tips on what ssds to get?