firewallwhisperer
Cadet
- Joined
- Jul 1, 2020
- Messages
- 4
Hey all,
Setting up a new FreeNAS box. I'm running a 36 bay super micro. I've got 16 8tb drives right now. Expandability is key. No VM's stored in FreeNAS but read/write performance is still important to me. Mirroring seems pretty much superior in every way except for storage efficiency. The 50% efficiency really sucks.
I've basically narrowed it down to these two options for pool configuration:
5-wide Z2 vdevs (Once the bays are maxed, I'll have 7 devs of 5 drives with one hot spare. Total usable storage space would be 168TB)
OR mirrored vdevs (Once full, I'll have 144tb usable storage.)
I figure the smallish size of 5-wide vdevs might be a good compromise of quick resilver times, storage efficiency, and easy scalability (only need 5 drives to increase capacity.)
My questions are:
1) If I do mirrored vdevs, does the size of the vdev really matter? I was thinking 4-wide mirrored vdevs.
2) The performance of z2 vdevs will be bad at first will it not? Simply because I don't have that many vdevs? How bad are we talking here? Once I expand and have more vdevs, how will the performance compare to mirroring?
3) If I'm storing all my VM's in local vSAN storage on my esxi hosts, am I overstating the importance of a performant pool?
4) What would YOU do in my shoes?
Setting up a new FreeNAS box. I'm running a 36 bay super micro. I've got 16 8tb drives right now. Expandability is key. No VM's stored in FreeNAS but read/write performance is still important to me. Mirroring seems pretty much superior in every way except for storage efficiency. The 50% efficiency really sucks.
I've basically narrowed it down to these two options for pool configuration:
5-wide Z2 vdevs (Once the bays are maxed, I'll have 7 devs of 5 drives with one hot spare. Total usable storage space would be 168TB)
OR mirrored vdevs (Once full, I'll have 144tb usable storage.)
I figure the smallish size of 5-wide vdevs might be a good compromise of quick resilver times, storage efficiency, and easy scalability (only need 5 drives to increase capacity.)
My questions are:
1) If I do mirrored vdevs, does the size of the vdev really matter? I was thinking 4-wide mirrored vdevs.
2) The performance of z2 vdevs will be bad at first will it not? Simply because I don't have that many vdevs? How bad are we talking here? Once I expand and have more vdevs, how will the performance compare to mirroring?
3) If I'm storing all my VM's in local vSAN storage on my esxi hosts, am I overstating the importance of a performant pool?
4) What would YOU do in my shoes?