a couple questions before I dive in...

[wrichards]

hello, Ive had a "nas" of sorts comprised of usb and NAS drives tied to router and PC. Im ready to build a FreeNas box but have a couple of questions. I watched a few install videos and read the forums

Ive got about 12 TB of data. Im assuming Ill need about 2x that for this to work right? so about a 24 TB system. so more likley 2 boxs. I was gong to use 4 tb drives....

my main question is about drive failure. is it my understanding that once the system is up and stable, that when any drive fails, I can simply pull that drive and replace it with a blank formated replacement and the system will simply refill that drive from shared drives? this is my main reason to build this system.

Any redirect to specific forums threads is greatly appreciated..
thanks in advance

 

[anodos]

hello, Ive had a "nas" of sorts comprised of usb and NAS drives tied to router and PC. Im ready to build a FreeNas box but have a couple of questions. I watched a few install videos and read the forums

Ive got about 12 TB of data. Im assuming Ill need about 2x that for this to work right? so about a 24 TB system. so more likley 2 boxs. I was gong to use 4 tb drives....

my main question is about drive failure. is it my understanding that once the system is up and stable, that when any drive fails, I can simply pull that drive and replace it with a blank formated replacement and the system will simply refill that drive from shared drives? this is my main reason to build this system.

Any redirect to specific forums threads is greatly appreciated..
thanks in advance

You can easily build a single FreeNAS server with 24+TB storage.

• The procedure for replacing a failed drive is explained in the User Guide, which you can download here: http://doc.freenas.org/
• Read this documentation about ZFS: http://forums.freenas.org/threads/slideshow-explaining-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/
• Make sure that any hardware you purchase meets the actual minimum requirements of FreeNAS and is generally supported: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hardware-recommendations-read-this-first.23069/

 

[wrichards]

thank you, I will do my best not to ask stupid questions, I just needed a starting point ,

again Thank you

 

[anodos]

thank you, I will do my best not to ask stupid questions, I just needed a starting point ,

again Thank you

No problem. Good luck. You may also want to make sure that your home router has gigabit ports (i.e. not 10/100). Newegg was running a deal yesterday or the day before on 6TB drives, which means you only need 6 drives to hit your target of approx 24TB if you go with a single RAIDZ2 vdev.

Note that 24TB is actually something like 21TiB. You shouldn't go above 80% usage, and so those drives will give you about 16TiB usable space before you need to start removing stuff, which gives you a headroom of about 4TiB over your current space needs. Depending on your future needs, it may be a good idea to go with more disks from the beginning, like an 8-disk RAIDZ2 vdev. This is because expanding the size of your zpool is a hassle. You can't add disks to a vdev.