What would you do / recommend?

[MassiveOni]

Heya,
Im new to this whole zfs and freenas thing, and after much reading I still can't find the correct answer for my setup.

Which zfs these 2 systems would you use on 8x 4tb wd reds, and 4x 3tb wd reds?

I want to maximise the amount of usable hard drive space, and one option is raidz1 for the 4x 3tb's and raidz3 for the 8x 4tb's.

What does everyone think?

Cheers

 

[Fox]

I personally would do this:

One VDEV with six drives, 4TB each at RAIDZ2, total usable space =16TB
A second VDEV with six drives, 3TB each at RAIDZ2 - Total usable space 12TB (Note, you will loose 2TB since two of the drives will be 4TB, but they will be treated as a 3TB)

Total usable space 28TB (remember recommended ECC memory of 32GB, or 1GB per TB)

You want to keep the number of drives in a VDEV at a power of two (2,4,8) plus the parity drives. In your selection, you don't seem to be doing that, plus one of the VDEV's has only one disk of redundancy while the other VDEV has three. If the RAIDZ1 VDEV has two drives go out or possibly an unrecoverable read error while re-silvering, from what I understand, you can loose the entire pool of the 12 drives.

But in the end it is a personal choice, where there are tradeoffs between redundancy/data security and space maximization.

 

[MassiveOni]

heya,
sorry i didnt explain it correctly
i have 2 systems,
one is a core i7 3610qm with 8gb of ddr3 and 4x 3tb, the other is a core i7 3630qm with 16gb of ddr3 and with 8x 4tb hard drives
hopefully that has cleared things up,
cheers

 

[willnx]

So many questions, so little time...

What are you storing on the NAS?
What's the workflow like?
Can you live with losing everything when your Raidz1 has two drive failures as once?
What's the recover plan for when your Raidz1 fails?
Notice I keep using "when"? :p
DDR3 ram, ECC ram?

There's not a single answer for "What should I do with all these HDD?" because everyone uses a NAS differently.
If it's one thing I've learned, it's that if you give a peace of tech to the masses, they'll figure out crazy ways to use things that you never thought of...

 

[MassiveOni]

heya, ok, time to give some info.

currently i have 2 machines

unas 400 (4 bay)
core i7 3610qm
8gb gskill ddr3 sodimm nonecc
jetway nf9g-qm77 with the geforce 610m
4x 3tb wd red
intel 6300 wifi card
biwin 64gb msata boot ssd

the other is

unas 800 (8 bay)
core i7 3630qm
16gb gskill ddr3 sodimm nonecc
jetway nf9g-qm77 with the intel quad giga nic
8x 4tb wd red
intel 6250 wifi wimax nic
biwin 240gb boot ssd

currently both have windows 7 pro the 4bay is being used just for windows media center, but i have ordered a banana pi to see how good raspberry pi xmbc is.

and the 8bay will be used as a backup of my media center, and torrent downloader, and just general backup of 1 desktop and 2 laptops, so i would call the workload level somewhere between "cat sleeping all day" and "bear hibernating for the winter"

now i have decided to go away from windows to freenas, i dont really need both now, but ill find something to do with the 4bay machine

how secure is raidz3?

other question is, what do you think of running the 4bay with freenas a plex or xbmc, to deliver your media, and using the 8bay to download, and store the media, and then use btsync to copy it over to the 4bay when its sorted?

 

[Fox]

I wouldn't do it with non-ecc memory.

Also, I am not sure I follow what your saying, but it seems you want to create two systems? Is that two FREENAS boxes, or one XBMC and one FREENAS box? If it's two FREENAS boxes, then I would not recommend that path. I would create only one FREENAS box, since the power consumption and upkeep of the system is double with two FREENAS boxes. If my assumption about two FREENAS boxes is wrong, then I would suggest you leave all the other non-freenas options out of the discussion, since it tends to confuse. Some people build FREENAS boxes with XBMC installed on them as well (double duty).

How secure is RAIDZ3? Maybe you mean to ask How "reliable" is RAIDZ3?
I would say it is more reliable than RAIDZ2, and much more reliable than RAIDZ1

I don't use plex, and my XBMC player is essentially separate from my FREENAS box, although my XBMC player reads the video files stored on my FREENAS box, which sounds maybe that's what you want?