I am new with enterprise gear and learning has been fun.
here is what i have going on, I am replacing my home built 12 year old NAS that’s been running OMV for the last year, before that just plain debian.
I picked up a R710, MD1200 and 14ish 1TB hard drives, at some point i want to upgrade them.
My end goal is a NAS to get my digital life more organized, run Plex, something for music, book,audio books, self hosted cloud, etc. (oh I want VM Storage for my R410 maybe iscsi for that and 10gb in the future)
I’ll have a off site back and another copy on a external hard drive.
Right know my head hurts from trying to figure out the best way to setup everything up, i was wanting ZFS but its definitely not straight forward as mdadm raid5 i am using now. I cant complain madadm have served me well.
any advice would be great.
Well, setting up ZFS is not too much more involved than setting up mdadm .
You might also Look at btrfs as the file system on mdadm array, if you don’t already have it, IIRC is shares a few features- COW anti corruption, snapshots, portability.
Might need a UPS to avoid the raid5 write hole though.
I have seen BTRFS and raid 5/6 unstable from everything i have read and the tools are just not there yet, even thought ill have back up i don’t want to deal with corrupted filesystems were i have to start over.
ZFS seems to be rock solid with tools, but everyone got options on how things should be setup. losing 50% of my RAW space to mirrors like most people suggests seems crazy to me.
I will have 18 drives in total does 3 x6 drive RAIDZ2 sounds like a way to go?
I’d say it depends on how much you trust the drives, but yeah, that would net you good speeds, strong reliability, and each of the raidz2 sets can be upgraded later on, growing the pool with just 6 drives at a time, rather than the wholes shebang
or should i follow the advice in this blog? http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs-not-raidz/
and this is why my head hurts.
I’d still go the 3x6 raidz2
I got a question about data sets. how should i treat them? just make one big one or use them as folders to organize things like media files.
Is freenas the way to go? or just go Linux and build it from scratch? I love having a nice UI but my luck with OMV has been little hit and miss, not that OMV reflects distros like Freenas or nas4free. i have to say my Debian built from scratch NAS was way more stable, that was so long ago i dont think there was much in the way of NAS distros then.
I’ve only played with FreeNas, and desktop OS’s myself, and found FreeNas pretty easy to get going.
Professional admins may have experience with proxmox or other OS’s.
Regarding Datasets, I use a bunch of them, like folders or partitions.
You might think of it as Vdevs are like the disks in an array, then you create a file system with the multiple vdevs (a zpool) then datasets are like the folders on top of that, so fewer pools, but many datasets.
Thanks for all your help.
After a Saturday adventure I have Freenas up and running.
My adventure has nothing to do with Freenas but my R710 and MD1200.
First I learned MD1200 only take SAS trays, the SATA trays are missing a notch so thy can fit.
after that trying and failed to update the iDrac, I gave up. then the MD1200 was not talking to the R710 that ended up being I needed to update the firmware, then it saw the MD1200.
why cant things be simple and work, but at least i leaned some new things. now off the getting files organized and installing some services.
I am still wondering thy the online leds on the MD1200 are not lit, but the activity lights work.
I am pretty happy that my file transfers are a flat 90MB’s to 110MB’s, I need to figure out how to test the array speed, based on activity lights on the MD1200 I think that more speed there.