3 or 5 drive for RAIDZ1

[.n3]

Hey,

I want to setup a homeserver with proxmox and TrueNAS, so my container (homeassitant, frigate nvr, ...) can use TrueNas directly as storage and also my private clients as storages for photos etc. I want to use 7-8TB for my surveillance and 6TB for private data. The surveillance can be lost and the private data will be backup. Therefor RAIDZ2 will be nice, but more expensive. If a drive die and during the restore a second drive dies, I will use the backup.

But what is better for a RAIDZ1? 3x 6/12TB WD Red Plus, or 5x 4TB WD Red Plus? I think 5x 4TB will be better because "cheaper". But what is, when a disk dies. Is the chance higher that a second disks dies with a 5 disk setup because there are double so much disks, or is the chance lower, because less data is each disk is restored? Are there also other (dis)advantages?

best regards

 

[ChrisRJ]

Welcome!

Sorry, but you are contradicting yourself in my view. If the death of second disk is enough of a concern as per your question, you should go for RAIDZ2. At the end of the day, 4 TB drives these days is dirt cheap.

The bigger concern should be running TrueNAS in Proxmox. This is an unsupported and highly advanced configuration, where things can go wrong easily.

To better understand your motivation and where you are coming from, what made you decide for TrueNAS? And are interested in Core or Scale?

 

[.n3]

Hey Chris,

for me RAIDz1 is sufficient because I will have a backup so RAIDz2 will only increase my uptime and less work if zwo disks fails. I read that RAIDz2 is recommended, therefor I'm interessting in statistics like: In how many installations does a disk dies in the first, second, third, ... year per percent. Furthermore, during the rebuild how many disks dies in percent?
The first question is optional, but the second question makes the topic more tangible, because on the net you often read when something doesn't work, but maybe that's only a fraction.

Yes, harddrives are "cheap" but this is a multiplier and everythink with a multiplier can be very expensive. The harddrives are actually 25-40% of the budget of the server. But this is going to be offtopic ;-)

Thank you for the hint with the TrueNAS in Proxmox "problem". This is an other topic and actually I'm trying to figure out what is better and why. A RAIDz1 with 3x 6/12TB WD Red Plus, or 5x 4TB WD Red Plus.

 

[WI_Hedgehog]

Why TrueNAS?

If you're trying to pack everything into one system, use LVM, and stay far, far away from ZFS.

Hardware raid locks you and your data into a specific vendor and their solution. If anything goes wrong with the RAID card you're using you may be struggling to get your data back, even after buying an exact replacement RAID card. I've learned this far too often with DELL servers and high-end quality RAID cards. If your backup solution is as old as your RAID solution, are your backups reliable? Because any failure in a backup chain means lost data.

Maybe the above is okay, maybe you have it worked out, often that's the case. If not, look into LVM, it's a great solution.

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Computers are really, really fast. There are quite a few data pipelines inside of them, and secondary error detection and correction systems. We imagine that to be really solid, but as systems are pushed to incredible speeds with incredible complexity errors become a daily occurrence, and the secondary ECC systems are relied upon to keep things stable, which is just plain wrong thinking.

TrueNAS is Datacenter level software, made for running on not necessarily expensive servers, but server-grade hardware none the less. Running it on anything less is not a good idea--in fact a bad idea--given the software design. Many people don't/won't accept this.

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From what you've said your data isn't "critical," and cost is a definite concern--which is great, you've mapped out your needs. TrueNAS is probably not going to be a good solution for you. As you get further into it you'll see it's going to require server-grade components (including network card), ECC memory (and a lot of it), really stable power, and the expenses and time invested are going to add up.

You're probably better off going with an operating system that runs on inexpensive consumer-level hardware, with inexpensive memory and that's simple to maintain, like a Synology box--that's a one-and-done solution.