What to do, what to do?

[MJN]

I just know enough to be dangerous - I admit it.

My goal is to store music and movies - a fair amount - 5-6 TB worth. All data is backed up off site. 1 music player in system, 2 movie players. Don't want any noise in music room, thus all drives are in a spare room elsewhere.

In general the data is placed on the disc drive once and read (played) many times. I think this used to be called WORM or something such

I have built a freenas 7 demonstration computer (small single drive with limited PC memory capability) and it seems to work fine for music and movies. Could do 2 movies and a music session simultaneously without issues. Works well so far.

Most music software scans the data drives and creates its own database of songs with their attendant locations, "tags" that have been edited, times played, etc,, etc. Thus, in general, one hates to have to redo everything (and trying to remember what music was on what drive) if something goes wrong. Having said that, it is not earth shattering if one has to create the music library again - it is very possible to live without music or movies for a few days, etc. Thus 100% uptime is not a necessity or a major life event - just nice.

So my questons are:

1) If I did a FreeNAS device for all of the data, what would be the preferred RAID level (if any) for my installation/needs? I have read the descriptions and there seems to be good/bad for every scenario.

I am also unclear that the ZFS options GETS ME anything of value.

2) Do I really need a NAS? Would an old clunker PC with either multiple shared internal drives in it, or multiple attached shared USB drives, on my network accomplish the same thing. It seems to me that, IN MY INSTALLATION, this would be the easiest to maintain - ie just replacing a single drive at a time as/if necessary. I don't know enough to know if "performance issues" would be an issue

Thanks for opinions and help. I have no real experience with this stuff and am looking for education from those who are experienced.

Robert Harris, M.D.

 

[louisk]

The only RAID levels I know of mirror (available in UFS or ZFS), RAIDZ, RAIDZ2 (both available in ZFS only). For 5-6TB, you will probably choose RAIDZ or RAIDZ2. Make sure you have 6-8G of RAM (1G per 1T of storage). You may be thinking of striping or concatenation. Neither of those is RAID because there is no redundancy. If you lose a disk from either, all data on the volume is gone.

ZFS gets you the ability to dynamically grow your storage capacity, either by adding additional disks (you can't remove them later), or by replacing disks with larger disks (all of this w/o having to move your data to another volume first).

Do you need a NAS? You could probably get by with an old PC. I expect that much of what would be required to reliably store your data on an old PC would be the same as what you would do for FreeNAS, so I don't really see a gain there.

I would think about what your requirements are (start very high-level if that helps and then work your way down) and that will dictate what kind of setup you have. For example, if you have a requirement that you need 1 spare disks for a RAID volume, your choice would be limited to either mirrors, or RAIDZ. Think about what it means if all the data is lost. Can you replace it given time? Is some of it irreplaceable? This may have an impact on how you decide to architect your solution.