Merge harddisks? (No RAID - just for convenience with SMB shares)

[Illanair]

I am completely green to File Systems so I thought I'd ask here.

I am currently using a feature in Windows Server 2003 where it "merges" (I think it's called extending?) my two harddrives into a single drive making it easier for me to make samba shares on my personal network.

Does FreeNAS have any similar features? I just want it to perceive the harddrives (I am aiming for 3 atm of different sizes - it's what I have lying around) as a single one so I can make my shares easier to use on the other side. If shares can consist of several locations at once that would be fine as well. I'm the only one who actually moves around stuff on the NAS - the family just reads files. :)

 

[cyberjock]

"Yes" and "No". Good answer, right? Read the guide(link in my sig). That will explain how you can potentially add storage. But for cost effectiveness you are better off building the server exactly how you want it up front.

 

[joeschmuck]

Here is a very quick and dirty rundown of what I think you are looking for...

1) You add all the drives you want in your system.
2) You create a RAIDZ1 or Z2 depending on how many drives and how much redundancy you need, and this makes one large volume for you to access.
3) You create datasets within the volume if you want seperate areas that can be access controlled or just partitioned away from other files.
4) You setup CIFS to share your volume/datasets and that is it.

This means you could have a shared volume as large as you want. Maybe it's 100TB, or 5TB, or even as small as you want, maybe 500MB for a dataset.

Hope this helps.

 

[Illanair]

I'll give the guide a read - but basically I don't need redundancy of any kind. Just the end result that I have one large drive to make shares easier to maintain (preferably not a setup where if one drive breaks, the contents on the other drives becomes useless)

Edit: Decided to move the harddisk specific comments from my "build thread" to avoid thread confusion. :)

That should be fine. What are your plans for the ZFS pool? (drives and pool configuration) It could make an impact on your RAM requirements if you are looking at something large. I run five 2TB drives in a RAIDZ1 with 8GB RAM, no problems at all. Unfortunately that is my maximum RAM size for this MB but it's enough.

Right now with my current case (and harddrives available) all I can put into it is 2, 2TB drives and a 1½ TB drive - as well as an old 2½" Harddrive for the OS. (It is a 2½" mount point so I couldn't put in another 3½ even if I wanted to)

As for what RAID setting to use - no idea. As I touched upon in my other thread I just want them to appear as a single drive for ease of use. No drive redundancy - but also not the issue where if one drive fails all of the other drives become useless as I believe RAID0 does?

If possible I'd like the following: If drive 1 breaks, Drive 2/3 retains their data, albeit incomplete if data is split across the drives (I know that no redundancy is risky I, but I need every terabyte I can get and nothing on the drives is irreplaceable. We have cloud drives for those few things that must never be lost) :)

 

[titan_rw]

You can certainly setup freenas to do the same as windows 'extend drive' function. But with no redundancy, if you loose any drive, you loose all data. In both cases, data would be spread across all drives in question, with no added redundancy. So if you loose any of the drives, none of the data is recoverable.

That's why redundancy is so important.

If you setup individual drives as separate shares, then one drive failing won't affect the other drives. But you have multiple shares.

What kinds / sizes of drives do you have?

 

[joeschmuck]

My recommendation is to take your two 2TB drives and add one more 2TB drive, create a RAIDZ1 with all three. This gives you ~4TB of storage. You can create three datasets and if you want you can place a quota on how much they can store, or leave the quota set to "0" and you use whatever space is available. These can then be shared individually on your network. With a RAIDZ1 you can tolerate a single drive failure and retain all your data. Two drives fail and you lost it all.

You should read noobsauce80's guide, it is very helpful and only takes a few minutes to read. Then you can ask more questions.

EDIT: Honestly you should go for four 2TB drives if you can swing it, it is Christmas after all. Read the guide and it will explain better.

 

[Illanair]

Alright - so making the harddrives pool together is probably not the best solution.

Can I make shares contain multiple locations and handle them (on the client side) as a single root folder (In other words lets say I have a folder called Video on both Drive 1 and 2 but want any clients connecting to the NAS to see only a single share that links both of these folders as one)

What drives? As I mentioned 2, 2TB drives and a 1½TB drive for storage. (As well as a small one for the OS)

 

[joeschmuck]

Another option is to create UFS formatted drives individually, but you can create ZFS formatted drives individually as well but these do not join the drives together at all.

 

[titan_rw]

Alright - so making the harddrives pool together is probably not the best solution.

Can I make shares contain multiple locations and handle them (on the client side) as a single root folder (In other words lets say I have a folder called Video on both Drive 1 and 2 but want any clients connecting to the NAS to see only a single share that links both of these folders as one)

What drives? As I mentioned 2, 2TB drives and a 1½TB drive for storage. (As well as a small one for the OS)

Sorry, I didn't see that you had mentioned the drives already.

Pooling the drives together is the best solution, if it can be done with redundancy.

There's no way that I'm aware of to have folders on different drives show up on a single cifs share.

Without buying extra drives, I would create a mirrored pool of your 2tb drives, so either one can fail without data loss. And a single pool of the 1.5tb drive, used as backup. If the 1.5 tb drive dies, the data on it is gone, but the 2tb pool is unaffected. Either of the 2tb drives can die without affecting any data.

As joeschmuck says, you're best to buy an extra hd or two. Buying one extra 2tb drive will give you a 3 drive raidz1 pool. Capacity of 2 drives, with one drive redundancy. Any of the 2tb drives can die without data loss. Buy 2 drives, and you get the capacity of 3 drives, still with one drive redundancy. The 1.5 tb drive I would still run separate from the 2tb drives. Use it for backup, or temporary space or something. No redundancy, but it's just a single drive.

 

[Illanair]

Alright - thanks for all of your advice. I'll give it some consideration and figure out what I'll do.

(I'll probably connect only one of the 2TB drives for now on its own and then comes next paycheck buy another 2TB drive and make a 2+1 Redundancy pool from scratch.)

 

[Stephens]

I don't get why the OP wants to migrate from Windows Server to FreeNAS. It could be lack of sleep, but I read the post as, "I want to move from Windows Server 2003 to FreeNAS, then make FreeNAS work exactly like Windows Server 2003."

 

[joeschmuck]

I don't get why the OP wants to migrate from Windows Server to FreeNAS. It could be lack of sleep, but I read the post as, "I want to move from Windows Server 2003 to FreeNAS, then make FreeNAS work exactly like Windows Server 2003."

Are you saying "If it isn't broke, don't fix it".

 

[Stephens]

Well I hope it didn't come off as flippant. I truly didn't understand the desire to move to FreeNAS from reading the original post. Maybe it was covered in other threads. But when people start talking about using various sized drives and doing ad-hoc incremental expansion of pools, those are not FreeNAS's strengths. Then add on the comment about not caring about protecting the data. Well, at that point, I seriously went back and read the original post again because I couldn't figure out why he wanted to use FreeNAS. Put another way, he seemed not to want any of what FreeNAS excels at, and wanted all of what it's weak at.

Let's call it a sanity check. ;)