Scaling forward with existing FreeNAS box

[XTREEMMAK]

Hi guys,

So I've had my FreeNAS setup for a good while with only one minor problem with the boot drive since I had it (the USB faulted and since, replaced it with 2 Mirrored SATA DOMs). If I remember currently how to state this, I have 2 pools: 1 with 6 drives in RAIDZ2 at 2TB a piece giving me ~7TB of usable storage, and another with 7 drives in RAIDZ2 at 4TB a piece giving me ~19TB of usable storage making for a total of ~26TB usable (FreeNAS reports 21.6TB usable). The system is maxed out on ram at 32GB.

ATM, I'm sitting at 40% total storage used which isn't bad given how long I've had the system up, but I've been starting to think about what might be the best way to scale my growing storage requirements? Some things I've considered:

1. Replacing the 2TB drives in the smaller pool with 3TB drives. This would give me ~11TB of usable storage which is just a 4TB gain; that's replacing 6 drives with 3TB drives that retail ~ $112 per drive ($672 total) for essentially what I could get with a single 4TB drive that goes for ~$130 (minus all the perks of double parity and what not). $672 for a wopping 4TB gain...Doesn't seem worth it. And I can't use 4TB drives as that would exceed my total RAM capacity...
   
   
2. Create a brand new server. I'm not sure if it would be possible to aggregate all the pools together on both servers, nor would I think it'd be entire necessary to do so. ATM, my one server functions as a media server, cloud file server, small DNS server, VPN server, reverse proxy, and "data download client". Backups are handled via offsite where the most important data is about 5TB across some of what's available on the server, and individual end points (yeah, still trying to create the initial backup >_>). It would be nice to have a dedicated file server as both a fast backup destination, and to make the first server mostly dedicated to media. With all this on my current server though, based on reports, I'm not taxing the CPU or RAM loads at all! I'm considering VM's and I think the system "may" handle a few, but since (as a guess) firing up a VM means taking away at RAM, it might have an effect on storage performance...again, haven't fully researched this possibility yet and still waiting on upgrading to FN11 atm.
   
   
3. Buy a Drobo. Now I'm not exactly sure how this would work since I've never really used one. From what I've seen though, you can't hook it up directly to the freenas box, but I'm sure there's nothing wrong with interacting with it via as a SMB share or something as its own endpoint. Though, I'm not sure if I'd want to run something like Nextcloud on it either as a dedicated file server. The good thing about Nextcloud though is that you can map external storage to it, so even though I wouldn't be hosting Nextcloud on it, I could still use it as a storage destination. This seems nice so far, though the initial cost of the box before drives isn't too inviting...

Those are what I've been thinking about. Overall I'm still pretty new to all this, but I am getting better with practice ^_^. Any advice or suggestions moving forward would be great!

 

[danb35]

And I can't use 4TB drives as that would exceed my total RAM capacity.

The RAM/capacity rule is a very rough and deliberately vague rule of thumb. Once above about 16 GB of RAM, your RAM requirements have much more to do with your workload than with your storage capacity. You'd be fine to replace the 2 TB drives with 4 TB ones.

 

[XTREEMMAK]

The RAM/capacity rule is a very rough and deliberately vague rule of thumb. Once above about 16 GB of RAM, your RAM requirements have much more to do with your workload than with your storage capacity. You'd be fine to replace the 2 TB drives with 4 TB ones.

Ahh! Good to know! I always thought it was a hard rule to match Ram to total usable capacity. That's certainly good news :)

 

[Stux]

Don't buy a drobo. Opaque and non-supportable. And it won't work with ZFS anyway.

I'd consider build a new system so the old one can be a backup, or migrating the old system into a new case (say a 24 bay 4u )