Upgrade of existing System

Thalhammer

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Mar 24, 2020
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3
Hello,

I do use FreeNAS for my Media Storage Server for Years now and although its an not supported configuration (Virtualized using KVM) it has been working great.
However I run out of space.
My current setup is as following:
6x SATA from Chipset (the whole controller is passthrough to FreeNAS, 4xSATA of the CPU is used for the VM host), i.e. direct hardware access.
8x SATA from a LSI SAS 9207-8i (also passed through)

Connected to it are
4x WD Green 4TB (Chipset)
2x Seagate NAS ST8000VN0002 8TB (Chipset)
2x TOSHIBA HDWN180 8TB (LSI)

They form 4 RAID 1 a 2 Disks.
As you can clearly see from the various disktypes, the server grew over the time.
So while RAID 1 worked great from me so far, it is mainly a relict of me not knowing what I do when I started out.
RAID Z1/Z2 have a better fault tollerance even with 4 disks and I should have started with it from the beginning.
Since I now run out of space AGAIN I'd like to change that.
The question is how.

What can I do to get the most space at a reasonable price (<1000€) while also moving from RAID 1 to something more secure.
RAID Z1 is not an option since its pretty much RAID 5 which tops out at 4TB disks doesn't it ?
So I would need to do RAID Z2.
One idea I had is as follows:
Toshiba Enterprise Capacity MG08ACA 16TB is quite cheap right now (~430€).
I could add 4 of them to my system in a RAID Z2 which would give me 32TB new space. Then I can copy all data from my array over and reconfigure both my 4 4TB, and my 4 8TB once to RAID Z2 after which I have 3xRAIDZ2 with a total of 56TB usable space. The ratio between drives and storage is as good (or bad) as before but now I have better redundancy.
However this solution is quite expensive (~1300€).

Is there a better solution I am missing ?
 

sretalla

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RAID Z1 is not an option since its pretty much RAID 5 which tops out at 4TB disks doesn't it ?
It's not recommended to run over 2TB disks due to scrub/resilver times.

Toshiba Enterprise Capacity MG08ACA 16TB is quite cheap right now (~430€).
I could add 4 of them to my system in a RAID Z2 which would give me 32TB new space. Then I can copy all data from my array over and reconfigure both my 4 4TB, and my 4 8TB once to RAID Z2 after which I have 3xRAIDZ2 with a total of 56TB usable space. The ratio between drives and storage is as good (or bad) as before but now I have better redundancy.
However this solution is quite expensive (~1300€).

Is there a better solution I am missing ?
You could reduce the number of VDEVs (if IOPS are not your priority) and have wider VDEVs (like 1 VDEV of 8 rather than 2 VDEVs of 4), but have much more storage.
 

Thalhammer

Cadet
Joined
Mar 24, 2020
Messages
3
No IOPS is not really a priority anymore as I have a PCIex SSD RAID 1 for all my VMs for quite some time now.
The server is only used for Backup and Media storage.
So you mean I should replace my 4TB drives with 8TB ones and rebuild all 8 drives as a RAID Z2.
This would give me 48TB of usable space which sounds given it is much cheaper.
Creating a RAID Z2 vdev with 4 drives and adding more drives as I copy data is not an option isn't it ?
If I where to fill it up again I will have to either replace all 8 drives with something bigger (16TB) or add a second 8 drive vdev with 8TB drives, right ?
I have read that there where plans to make zfs support expanding of RAID Z2 vdevs but it seems as if they never manifested.
 

sretalla

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Creating a RAID Z2 vdev with 4 drives and adding more drives as I copy data is not an option isn't it ?
If I where to fill it up again I will have to either replace all 8 drives with something bigger (16TB) or add a second 8 drive vdev with 8TB drives, right ?
Expanding a VDEV isn't possible (for now), but extending a pool is... theory says you should avoid unmatched VDEVs, but it's not so much of a problem if you retain the same RAIDZ level on all VDEVs in the pool and your focus is not IOPS/performance as such.
You could just replace all drives in the pool with bigger ones and have a second pool with the smaller disks (assuming you have the space/controller for it).

I have read that there where plans to make zfs support expanding of RAID Z2 vdevs but it seems as if they never manifested.
It's still work in progress, coming in a year or more.
 
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