Single Drive ZFS pools/CIFS-shares?

[frellAn]

Hi FreeNAS forums!

I have searched around the whole web it seems and nowhere can I find a solid answer to my question. It seems weird to me but maybe I'm just plain stupid for even thinking of this...

I wonder if it is stupid to run like three 3TB drives as single vdevs and then single pools. I really wanna have all the space available to me and I don't really care about if one drive fails because I'm only gonna store Movies and TV Shows and those kinda files aren't really un replaceable. I also wanna be able to add drives in the future in a simple way without them all being locked up in a RAID. If one drive fails, I want only that drive to die. For my valuable files I wanna instead run two 2TB WD Greens mirrored (that I already own).

All talk about ECC memory and whatnot seems to break my budget, and nooo not the RAM itself but the freakin motherboards to support it is three times as expensive as what I want to build, at least when I'm looking on convenient sites in Sweden. I wanna build a simple mini-ITX system with some decent CPU-power (6xSATA board with AMD A4-7300 + 8GB RAM). It will work for my needs which is basically just streaming movie files to my HTPC even though I know it is nowhere near a optimal setup for FreeNAS.

Now can I run two-three 3TB drives as single ZFS pools and use plugins to download stuff on them and share them as individual CIFS shares? I guess this kinda defeats the purpose of ZFS so should I just keep them as UFS? Can I still use plugins somehow?

With this I wanna run a mirrored ZFS with my two 2TB drives and create another individual share from that where I can put all my irreplaceable files. All these CIFS shares will show up in my OSX-Finder and my Windows-Explorer as individual network drives, right?

I know I'm gonna loose some of ZFS features without any redundancy disks, will Snapshots still work? What will not work? UFS instead?

Now please comment on this and tell me straight if it's just plain dumb because to me, this seems like the best solution for me. And sorry for the number of questions but I hope you get my line of thought...

 

[Ericloewe]

Thoughts:

You can certainly run pools made up of single drives or you can stripe all three in one pool for extra daredevil-ism. You will be able to do everything except recover from errors. A single error will render the pool unusable (this is a design decision to ensure data is always valid). Stuff can be shared on as many shares as you (reasonably) want.
You can also run a proper pool next to your "don't give a damn" setup for valuable data and it will do everything FreeNAS allows.

Forget UFS or FreeNAS. UFS will be dropped when 9.3 arrives.

As for the hardware, be aware that AMD stuff is likely to cause trouble, for a number of reasons. You'll also find it hard to troubleshoot unusual issues if you don't have ECC.
If you drop the miniIX requirement, there's a lot of reasonably-priced microATX stuff to choose from, as detailed in the hardware sticky.

 

[cyberjock]

To be honest, after reading all of that I think your two best options are:

1. Drop money on proper hardware and such to run everything properly.
2. Give up on FreeNAS and use something else.

What you are doing makes me cringe because it's not going to be upgradable, is asking for unreliability and such, and just isn't a good fit for FreeNAS. FreeNAS can do a lot of very cool things, but only within limits. It seems you're wanting to stretch those limits beyond what is reasonable.

 

[frellAn]

I've listened to what you said and changed my build for better gear, it was doable using a cheap Intel Pentium G3220. All in all I have to pay about 1000 SEK (140$) more for the build but I decided it is definitely worth it for the lower power consumption alone.

My new problem is that I still wonder if ZFS is really overkill for my current needs and will create more problems than it will solve. As mentioned I only need a 2TB mirror for all my important data (GoPro videos, Pictures etc). The rest of the NAS I will use for my "dont-give-a-shit" media (XBMC). Even though I don't give a shit it seems stupid to put it all in RAID0 because it's still a pain to loose ALL data when I could have just lost the single drive that failed.

FreeNAS and ZFS seems like a really stable and robust system so I would really like to go with it with good hardware. The optimal setup for me would be to use:

1 ZFS pool with 2xTB WD Greens mirrored (important data).
1 unRAID/FlexRAID/SnapRAID with 4x4TB WD Reds (XBMC media).

I know this can't be done under FreeNAS so what would You suggest? Giving up on FreeNAS and going with OMV and just put RAID1 on the greens and use FlexRAID on the rest? FlexRAID doesn't seem to work on OMV though so maybe I will use SnapRAID but it' all really a big mess to me with third-party plugins and all that, seems like it can't really be relied upon in the long term.

I'm currently leaning towards going with FreeNAS anyway with recommended hardware so I can have all the wonder of ZFS on the mirrored pool and use all the stability of plugin jail and all that and then just run the rest of the drives as single drive ZFS pools.
I can't really use RAID-Z on 4 drives and if I go RAID-Z2 I loose two drives and then I can just go 2xRAID1 really so all that is really out for me.
Suggestions?

 

[cyberjock]

I really can't tell you how good/bad FlexRAID is in relation to being an alternative to ZFS. When I read up on the options a few years ago (which got me into this project) I decided that I was going all the way to the top, and that meant going ZFS.

You *could* do two pools if you wanted, its really about what you want and how important your data is. Some people want FreeNAS just as a "first step" to getting into ZFS. ZFS is the future for storage, and it looks like you are bound to run into it someday, whether you like it or not. So it's something that I personally recommend to IT guys so they can at least understand ZFS.

Other than that, I don't have any suggestions. You seem to understand the basics and are recognizing some of your limitations (for example, RAIDZ1 is bad but RAIDZ2 doesn't give you enough disk space) but there are no suggestions to give. Either you accept RAIDZ1 (which you seem to have already basically done with your current configuration) or you go to RAIDZ2 and add more drives. There's no other options. :P

 

[frellAn]

After a lot of thinking and researching I have decided to go with the OpenMediaVault OS instead. FreeNAS and ZFS is by far the best in many ways but for me and my Media-only storage needs, OMV + Snap-Raid (for media storage) + RAID1 (for secure data) will be perfect. Thank you for all your replies!