What I have, What I want to do, how it's set up now, and my current issues

[Poetart]

It's up to you, but WD will not honor warranties for drives pulled from external enclosures. Even if you are able to reinstall the drive in its enclosure, and convince WD that you never removed the drive, the warranty is only 2 years instead of 3 years. If having warranty protection is important to you, then I would reconsider, though that is an incredible $/GB.

Mulling it over. I'll pick up the RED's for my long term media storage / Archive. Going to take up the most space and need the least amount of speed.
Ill stick with the Drives I currently have for the block storage for now. Work on getting the seagates

Seems like you have to chunk a lot of space out of the vol for a few things. http://wintelguy.com/zfs-calc.pl

Thinking of a 4 or 5 drive RAIDZ1 for it.
5 is getting a little close to the comfort-zone for one parity drive but should be fine (Think its more the cost getting to me than anything).
4 is not recommenced in a Z1 and having one less drive and moving into a RAIDZ2 seems like it might shave off too much storage to be useful.
Right now, Media Library is taking up about 5.79TB. Once I get a stable array and finish DL'ing a lot of my old missing media I should be around the 8-10TB mark.
So ~12-14TB of usable space ( This is not taking the slop and 20% free space into account ) is what I am aiming for.
Just making sure I make the right decision before I drop 400-600 on HDD.

 

[Nick2253]

4 is not recommenced in a Z1

I'm assuming you are referring to a thoroughly debunked argument about optimal drive count for various parity levels. 4 or 5 drives won't matter.

5 is getting a little close to the comfort-zone for one parity drive but should be fine (Think its more the cost getting to me than anything).

The bigger issue for one-drive parity is the resilver time. When you're using 8TB drives, your resilver time will be measured in days, and will thoroughly bog down the system. This means that, while resilvering, your array is now completely vulnerable to a second drive loss or any kind of URE. Don't forget, drive failures are usually non-independent events, because the drives usually come from the same batch, and have experienced nearly identical lifetime stresses.

Seems like you have to chunk a lot of space out of the vol for a few things.

The biggest loss is because HDD use is measured in TiB, and HDD are marketed in TB. ZFS also requires space for its checksumming, though that doesn't really take too much.

 

[Poetart]

I'm assuming you are referring to a thoroughly debunked argument about optimal drive count for various parity levels. 4 or 5 drives won't matter.

That's good to know. I saw a hell of a lot of posts about that and it got me a bit worried.

The bigger issue for one-drive parity is the resilver time. When you're using 8TB drives, your resilver time will be measured in days, and will thoroughly bog down the system. This means that, while resilvering, your array is now completely vulnerable to a second drive loss or any kind of URE. Don't forget, drive failures are usually non-independent events, because the drives usually come from the same batch, and have experienced nearly identical lifetime stresses.


The biggest loss is because HDD use is measured in TiB, and HDD are marketed in TB. ZFS also requires space for its checksumming, though that doesn't really take too much.

Ok, didn't know that rebuild would be that long. Here is what I am looking at for RAIDZ2 5 drives. Think I might just bite the bullet on this with the price of those drives. Don't think I am going to see pricing like that for a while.

 

[Poetart]

Just a quick update, Was not able to drop by for those drives yesterday due to a hell of a lot of ice on the roads but I did manage to get the 10G link between the server and my PC up.

Parts are starting to come in as well. Just waiting on a few things then I will work on the swap.

 

[Nick2253]

Glad to see that the link is working. Is your plan to virtualize FreeNAS in ESXi, or are you going to install FreeNAS directly on that server?

 

[Poetart]

Glad to see that the link is working. Is your plan to virtualize FreeNAS in ESXi, or are you going to install FreeNAS directly on that server?

Yeah, I planned on virtualization it inside of ESXi and then hosting a few other things on the server.

 

[Poetart]

Strange issue happening, Looks like 2 of the new drives are not showing up at all. Might be a power pin issue I have been seeing but not sure. Will have to test out a bit more to see but I'll be out of town for a few day so you probably won't see an update for a few days.
Will post more when I get a chance.