I am trying to setup the best backup server/NAS I can for the family files. Here’s the run down.
I am using NAS4Free installed onto a 160GB HD in UFS. quad core xeon with 16gb of ecc DDR3 memory.
I have 4 SAS 10k rpm hard drives hooked up to a raid card. (configured the raid card to not use caching, set to write through, all drives are in separate vdevs.
the first 3 drives are 150GB the 4rth drive is 300GB.
If a drive were to fail I am not able to get a replacement drive. And would need to migrate all the data to a new hard drive until I can “fix things”
What kind of ZFS should I create? Right now the server is initializing a RAIDZ-2 with the 4 drives selected.
I have never dealt with ZFS before and I am very confused Because my use case has a different sized drive.
… I guess RAIDZ2 would be the best of what’s left, as far as your options for using this hardware are concerned. Is sinking any money into this build an option? I’m thinking you should be able to pick up some 500GB SATA drives on the cheap. They’d be larger than what you have, easier to replace should one die, and for most use cases, just as fast.
I would like to spend no money on this data storage solution.
I got the server for free, and don’t really know what to do with it. (i’m open for suggestions of possible uses) I’m not even sure if I should be using ZFS since I have a cached battery backed up RAID card.
Before I got the server my backup solution was DVD’S and keeping a copy on a hard drive stored in a safe place. But it becomes super annoying when a file on the dvd gets modified and stored on the HDD, or I need to get a file off the stored HDD.
as an update, I got the RAIDZ2 pool setup with 3x150gb and 1x300GB hard drives and it shows 540GBS of usable space(i had to use the -f because 1 drive was a different size).
I saw a post on a different forum that talked about pulling a single drive out and how it will not lose any data but will leave the data in a vulnerable state. So I think I found my answer. if any of the drives die I will have time to migrate to a regular hard drive and live my life like a normal consumer.
Honestly, though, it’s probably not a bad idea. If you want a NAS long term, you’ll probably want to dump the “proper enterprise” hardware and go with a typical white box build. You could probably rice out your server with SATA drives and a proper HBA controller card, but you’ll still be sucking down quite a bit of power from the wall compared to a basic white box.
You can set a lot of RAID cards to just act as ports for a JBOD. From this you could then create ZFS pools.
I would be tempted to have a pool wth the 3x150GB disks and then have the 300GB disk in a pool by itself for less important data e.g. using it for torrents and downloads that you can always go get a again. You could also just use it as an extra copy of the data in the pool e.g. sync it up once a week or month.
One alternative is that since you cannot replace the disks just have a 2 disk 150GB mirror and then keep the other disks in storage as spares. You didn’t say how much data you need to store.
600-ish GB of usable space. In case of failure. But SAS drives are way more reliable than SATA drives. We have some where I work going on 6 years now.
But if you use different sizes then the one with the highest capacity is the most ‘important’ drive. But ZFS distributes the load evenly across all drives, and makes changes when it notices a drive getting full.
