I'm trying to decide on what I want for my home server. I was thinking of building a Freenas PC with the Intel avoton board because it is small form factor and supports up to 12 drives.
I'm also thinking of using the new Fractal 804 case.
My biggest question is about drive storage, The fractal case has support for (up to) 12 drives and I know the avoton board will support it; But my question is; If it's going to have 10+ GB of storage is it better to use 2-3 4GB drives or would it be better to split the load over 5+ 2TB drives? I've never seen a comparison or benefit evaluation of using less large drives compared to more smaller drives.
Any input would be great, Thanks guys!
With FreeNAS if you just had 3x 4TB drives as independent vdevs in a 12TB pool, data gets striped across all drives evenly, similar to raid-0. Now if one of those drives goes bad for some reason, you lose the whole pool, because parts of every file were on the failed drive. You could go for 4x 4TB drives in raidz1, which is like raid-5. This gives you one parity drive, which basically allows you to stay fully operational if any one of the drives fail, and replacing the drive rebuilds the missing data onto the new drive. That's not so bad. But consider that 2x 2TB drives cost about exactly the same as 1x 4TB drive (WD Reds on Newegg are around a dollar cheaper for 2x 2TB). First of all, you can actually build an array closer to your target 10TB instead of overshooting by 2TB (if that matters at all). But building a 12TB array even, you would need 6x 2TB + 1x 2TB parity drive. So your array is now cheaper by the cost of one 2TB drive. Better yet, for about the same cost as the array using 4TB drives, you could have 2x 2TB parity drives using raidz2 (like raid-6). Now any TWO drives can fail and the array will still be fully operational, and replacing a failed drive is half as expensive.
Thanks for the reply!
This is pretty much exactly what I wanted to know. So using 7 2TB drives I can hit 10TB of storage with 2 safe parody drives. Thanks for the help.