Thinking of adding storage, best practices?

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Cthulhu

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Apr 15, 2014
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I set up a FreeNAS server last summer and I made a few non-optimal choices due to financial constriants that I'd like to correct.

My current config is FreeNAS 9.2 running off a USB stick, with 4x 3TB WD Red drives configured as RAIDZ1. Two Plex instances serving a maximum of three streams HD streams between them, and an owncloud instance with one user and half a dozen client systems (two of which are mounting davfs not synchronizing). 16GB ECC RAM, with ample CPU cycles to spare (Xeon E3-1230v2). Used space is a little more than 50% (4.4GB). That's where I'm at now.

My intent is to add a two more 3TB disks and reconfigure as a RAIDZ2 to add capacity and redundancy, and at the same time, upgrade to 9.3. I understand I'll have to rebuild the zfs pool to accomplish this, which means backing up my existing data (twice), doing the install, and restoring my zfs datasets.

I have a technical background, but I'm reasonably new to zfs. I also have somewhat limited resources - I don't have a suitable tape subsystem, but I do have several external USB 3.0 drives (2x 4TB and 1x 3TB).

95%+ of my data isn't *critical*, it's replaceable, but the rest isn't.

How would you go about doing this upgrade?

ETA: I know I'm going to take some performance hit going from RAIDZ1 to RAIDZ2. I ok with this, redundancy is far, far more important to me.
 
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Bidule0hm

Server Electronics Sorcerer
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Aug 5, 2013
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Well, you can copy the non-critical data once and the critical data twice (on two different drives), maybe three times on three different drives if you have the space, it's what I would do ;)

The performance hit will be negligible and moreover the network will be your bottleneck by far (except if you've a 10G network of course), no worries here.
 

gpsguy

Active Member
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Jan 22, 2012
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Was this a typo? At the end of your message, you say you are switching from RAIDz1 to RAIDz2.

My current config is FreeNAS 9.2 running off a USB stick, with 4x 3TB WD Red drives configured as RAIDZ2.
 
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