ZFS config assistance (16 drives)

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I got 16 14TB drives that are going into 1 pool (I just want one big drive, maybe two with a few TB seperated) and is going be a NAS with plex.

I’m thinking of running RAID-Z3 with unraid or FreeNAS, leaning unraid because I want a fast noob friendly setup.

Is there anything else I should be doing here (too many or too few drives for Z3?) or is this a functioning and sane setup?

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With ZFS you can do as many drives as you like, all with a single shared pool.

You probably don’t want all disks in a single vDev. I’m not sure how long a resilver or a scrub of an 18-wide 14TB Z3 is, but it won’t be pleasant to say the least. And degraded performance may or may not be what you need for performance. You also benefit from striping with each vdev beyond the first vdevs, increasing performance the more vdevs you add.

I’d set up everything with two or three vdevs with RaidZ2, making everything much easier and faster, including write speed, expansion and rebuilds.

TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) has a great plugin for PLEX. No need for Unraid for that. But choose whatever UI is more appealing.

check out this to get a rough overview, helped me quite a bit setting up my pool: FreeNAS ZFS VDEV Pool Design Explained: RAIDZ RAIDZ2 RAIDZ3 Capacity, Integrity, and Performance. - YouTube

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Thanks for the feedback!

so I’m thinking, 1 pool consisting of 3 vdevs for my 16 drive setup, a 3x (5x14TB drives) with 1 spare is a reasonable configuration? I don’t want to lose any data, but if I end up having to resilver I’ll have the spare to lean on aswell.

I would end up losing around 30 TB of usable space, huge trade-off, but big protection reward?

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Actually 1 pool 2 vdevs z2 with 8 drives each seems to be a good way to get more storage and performance compared to 16 drives in one z3 vs what I suggested above here with the 3 vdevs z2

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Sounds like you should have made a poll: “if you had 16 14T drives what ZFS layout would you use” …

p.s. I’d vote for 2x 8drives (raidz2) for 75% space efficiency

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I’d vote 2x8z2.

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