2x 3TB and 2x 250GB?

[Skyfox]

Hi guys!

I am a true FreeNAS noob and have a few questions I am hoping can be answered.

I currently have FreeNAS setup with 4 small drives, mainly just to test and get used to it. Working great. I would eventually like to get 4x 3TB, however I can't afford to at the moment. So was going to get just 2x3TB and add more later.

After reading the forums, i understand it's not a good idea to do it this way. But, is it reasonable to have 2x3TB and 2x250TB is the same zpool and then replace the 2x250GB drives one at a time. Will this work? Are there any downsides I am not aware of?

In adition, when is FreeNAS 9.1 due? As a noob, is it worth waiting for it's release rather than trying to upgrade from 8.3?

Many thanks!

 

[warri]

Yes that is a valid option, you can find infos about growing a volume here: http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Volumes#Replacing_Drives_to_Grow_a_ZFS_Pool

The downside is that your pool will - depending on your setup - only have around 500GB (Raid-Z2) or 750GB (Raid-Z1) available in the beginning. 8.3.1 is really stable, so if you want to get started don't bother to wait. The upgrade to 9.1 should be mostly painless eventually.

 

[Skyfox]

Thanks for the feedback, I may just have to take the plunge and buy 4 drives. 4x2TB may be enough for me.

I see that you are running Caviar Greens in your setup. I was planning on getting the Reds, mainly due to the 3 year warranty, but also partly because I had read people saying to NOT use greens for one reason or another. Would you suggest the greens are perfectly fine for NAS use?

Cheers!

 

[warri]

The Greens are running perfectly fine in my system for around 3 years now. It's configured to not put the HDDs in standby to avoid any unnecessary fatigue, seems to be a good setup so far.
I'm currently in the progress of upgrading to 3TB devices, and I had to decide between Greens and Reds as well. I ended up choosing the Greens, because I never had any problems with them.

If you get brand new drives consider mixing vendors or dealers, so that you don't end up with four drives of the exact same manufacturing batch. If this exact batch is prone to fail your chances of loosing the whole pool increases.

 

[Skyfox]

Good call on the multiple dealers idea, I will be doing that now.

I read something about the Greens spindown being disabled, but wasn't 100% clear on how. Is it a firmware setting that you have to alter (if so, I have no idea how to go about doing that) or is it in FreeNAS itself?

Thanks again!

 

[warri]

Some people argue that the internal spindown (by firmware - i.e. the time after which the head gets parked) might be disadvantageous for the life expectancy of Green HDDs. WD provides a tool (Windows-only) to change the spindown configuration of the Green devices in the firmware, have a look at this discussion: http://serverfault.com/questions/242891/disable-caviar-green-drives-spinning-down
This behaviour cannot be changed by FreeNAS.

I personally did not know about this discussion when I built my NAS and therefore never modified the settings. So I'd say it's not a crucial procedure.. But you should read some opinions and decide for yourself.

Some more information:
- http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=15554.0 (Do not run WDIDLE3 /D on the new Western Digital EZRX drives)
- http://www.storagereview.com/how_to...igital_2tb_caviar_green_wd20ears_with_wdidle3

And google will probably give you a lot more results ;)