z2 pool vdev questions

[Mr_N]

So i'm going to start building a new nas box after a less than pleasant experience with one of the thecus models of purpose build nas units and i've chosen FreeNAS RaidZ2 as it seems like a good balance between storage space and redundancy.
The main use will be storage of my media collection, so mostly reading from rather than writing too, and redundancy with cost being a factor is the most important issue as in the future once its grown in size i wont be able to have a backup of it all.

If i use a group of 6 disks for my first vdev using 4TB drives, for an initial pool size of around 14.8TB and then add more vdevs of identical number/size in the future as space is required this would work?

The case im going with holds a decent number of drives and with the other hw options ive chosen i'd end up with a max pool of almost 90TB (6 vdevs) once its full, using 4TB drives, but will i then in the distance future be able to use the swap out technique to replace one drive at a time in one vdev at a time with bigger drives and expand it without having any negative affects given the other 5 vdevs would be smaller still until the next vdev was expanded later on?

Also the other question i have is around the access method for my nas, currently it'll only be a single windows box, but in the future I may put it online to allow me to share my media collection with family or friends so i'm not sure whether to use cifs/samba or iscsi and then in the future setup a ftp on my windows box to share the space, or just use ftp directly from freenas from the start, anyone have any thoughts? Would i even be able to use iSCSI with the above intentions of expansion?

 

[cyberjock]

You should read the stick in this form section. It will answer pretty much all of your questions.

The choice of FTP, iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, AFP is mostly a personal choice based on your computers. If you were all Apple you might want AFP. The fast majority of home users use CIFS because its the most widely supported among all OSes.

iSCSI doesn't allow you to "expand" as far as I know. So you'd have to make a new iSCSI device and copy your data from the "smaller" device to the "larger" device if you wanted to increase the storage space.

 

[Mr_N]

i've done quite a bit of reading and not come across any info on expanding one vdev at a time out of a group of vdev's which is why i posted :)
and the cifs/ftp/iscsi yeah i understand its more of a personal choice yet feedback is always nice to get a feel for each option...

 

[Mr_N]

i watched your powerpoint pres and it was a good informative intro to freenas, should be on the main website ;)

will i have any issues starting with 16GB of ram (2x8GB), to save money, and adding another 16GB later on when my storage pool increases via added vdevs?