Hello there! I am looking to build a FreeNAS box and can't decide which configuration I should implement. I own a 4TB Seagate. I am going to go with mirror vdev(s) instead of RAIDZ(n) because they are simpler, easier to rebuild and easier to upgrade. Requirements are data redundancy and throughput (I want to switch to Linux and have a network Windows VM for gaming and Adobe that I can boot off, not sure how I can do that, advise on that too if you can
My options are: 1. Buy two 4TB WD Reds and make a 3 way mirror including the Seagate just to be safe 2. Buy four 2TB WD Reds, put them in two mirror vdevs and somehow use the Seagate as backup/mirror?
I am also looking to add a small SSD for improved write performance.
Hi, this sounds like a cool project. Your idea of 2 drives in 2 mirrors sounds the best for the use case- loading games will be marginally quicker over GBE than a single pair, and allow for upgrading easier over time too. Also having the 4tb drive as a backup sounds cool too. I'd personally keep the SSD on the local machine for faster boot/ app launching, as it would be a bottleneck writing to the array over the network, unless you anticipate power issues during transfers?
I do have an 840 Pro on the local machine. I just think an SSD would improve write performance as I am into photography and thought it might be useful. Also, half of the electrical outlets in my house (including those I am using) are connected to a single circuit breaker which might get overloaded maybe once a month so I do anticipate some power issues (I'm also looking for a UPS for that reason)
I would put the 2Tb in mirror and use the 4Tb. as a single disk ZFS zpool. Now you can use zfs send/receive to make backups of the mirror to the 4Tb., because as you know, raid/mirror is not a backup
The ssd i strongly recommend. But be aware ZFS (NAS) + games is a hit and miss. A 1/4 of them don't work. I speak from personal experience. Have 6x3TB in raidz2 + ssds for log/cache. And on top all of this Steam under linux sees the ZFS samba share as 0MB big. Frustrations over 9000.
A SSD log/cache device is always a good idea with ZFS on traditional HDDs. With ZFS send/receive you can keep a 'history' of backups, so you could even go back in time. We use it to have 2 failover systems for every container/KVM server and keep up to two snapshots of each instance. ZFS is powerful 'stuff', but beware, it likes A LOT of memory. Samba sharing ZFS I've not tried yet, ZFS usually combines better with NFS, but afaik there is no good Win client for that. Don't know much about Win though, so things might have changed.
I haven't bothered with a cache device on my nas, as I store mostly media files and backups on it, so not no need for an l2arc, and I'm fine with the transfer speeds sending files to it. For the original upload a cache would have helped, but I physically moved my disks and did a zfs send/receive locally instead (I switch my main rig off nightly)
