engineerxd
Cadet
- Joined
- May 22, 2020
- Messages
- 1
So I've got my old workstation (from work) coming home with me this weekend, 2010 Dell T3500, Xeon E5630, 18gb ECC Ram and small drives. The board has 5 Sata connectors but it looks like it will be a real struggle to fit five 3.5" drives, four seems a lot more reasonable thanks to the two 5.25" bays.
My budget allows for either two 8tb drives or four 4tb drives. I've got about 5tb of crap right now so my thought was to go with two 8tb drives mirrored for now (or zfs1 if that makes more sense) and add another pair of 8tb drives next year...with the ultimate goal of four 8tb drives in a zfs2 setup (five if I can fit them although if I can fit five, the 4tb route could work). It sounds like conversion will be a bit of a task but it would allow me to get everything off the portable USB drives it is on now. Is this a reasonable thought process?
The other question is with regards to a backup solution. It seems like USB written in a format that can be read by an OS that commonly ships on retail laptops is not an option. How much of an issue is backing up across the network? I mean, I can plug in the laptop and let it do its thing for hours on end if necessary but it is not exactly ideal. Is importing data from USB a viable option?
I've got no experience in Freenas or Linux (other than playing around with Ubuntu on an old laptop to see if I could figure out how to share the drive. Admittedly it probably took longer than it should have but I did manage to do it). I probably forgot something and my plan might not actually make any sense but I've got to start somewhere and this is where I am right now.
Probably going to play around with a USB installation and the pair of 320gb drives that are in there this weekend if I find time...and I think I need to verify that all five Sata ports can be used at once because if I can fit 5 drives, that might change things.
My budget allows for either two 8tb drives or four 4tb drives. I've got about 5tb of crap right now so my thought was to go with two 8tb drives mirrored for now (or zfs1 if that makes more sense) and add another pair of 8tb drives next year...with the ultimate goal of four 8tb drives in a zfs2 setup (five if I can fit them although if I can fit five, the 4tb route could work). It sounds like conversion will be a bit of a task but it would allow me to get everything off the portable USB drives it is on now. Is this a reasonable thought process?
The other question is with regards to a backup solution. It seems like USB written in a format that can be read by an OS that commonly ships on retail laptops is not an option. How much of an issue is backing up across the network? I mean, I can plug in the laptop and let it do its thing for hours on end if necessary but it is not exactly ideal. Is importing data from USB a viable option?
I've got no experience in Freenas or Linux (other than playing around with Ubuntu on an old laptop to see if I could figure out how to share the drive. Admittedly it probably took longer than it should have but I did manage to do it). I probably forgot something and my plan might not actually make any sense but I've got to start somewhere and this is where I am right now.
Probably going to play around with a USB installation and the pair of 320gb drives that are in there this weekend if I find time...and I think I need to verify that all five Sata ports can be used at once because if I can fit 5 drives, that might change things.
