A few questions, and thoughts on my future freenas.

[xMista_G_Nerdx]

Hello,

I am completely new to freenas and I have a rudimentary understanding of RAID systems. For my build, I have a general focus of scalability in regards to HDD space. My current goal is to start with my finances targeted to the CPU/MOBO/RAM. I intend to add and upgrade my HDD's later.

My case will be the Cooler Master Storm Stryker SGC-5000W-KWN1, featuring 9x 5.25 Drive bays. When used with DataCage Classic MGB455SPF-B 5x3.5" in 3x5.25" Hot Swap HDD Cage, I will be able to fit 15x3.5 Drives in the tower.

Up until recently I was under the impression that a zpool cannot have hard drives added to increase space. Which would have been a problem for me because I intend to fill each cage at later dates as I do have a budget. I read part of the powerpoint provided by cyberjock and now believe I can add 5 hard drives at a time and create a new vDev, adding that vDev to the zPool. Meaning to get the system up and running I can start with the first cage of 5 HDD's being vDev1. At a later time I can add the next cage of 5 HDD's as vDev2, Increasing the overall storage space of my Pool.

My current Hard drives are of varying storage capacities. I assume this is a "strong as the weakest link" scenario. Wherein the maximum capacity used from each drive in a vDev is the same as the smallest capacity drive. For example I have 4 x 2TB drives and my 5th Drive is 350gb. The vDev will only read them as 5 x350gb drives until I upgrade the 5th. If mixing and matching sizes isn't going to cause problems for the machine, I intend to throw together 5 HDD's to get the system up and running then buy 4TB Drives later. This will allow me to focus more of my current budget on other hardware.

So this is my general plan thus far. Please if any one of my ideas/beliefs are misconceptions let me know and point me in the right direction. Now, onto my questions.

How can I find Motherboards Suporting ECC? Websites that i've searched don't really let me filter by ECC. Tigerdirect will filter RAM by ECC support, but not MOBO's or CPU's. I don't really want to pick the first ECC MOBO I see. I prefer to shop around and weigh the spec's in my head.

Will upgrading RAM be a problem? I want to start with 16GB of RAM and upgrade or add more sticks in later.

I apologize if these questions are common, but i'm tired and am off to bed. I will continue reading cyberjocks guide and check back for responses after a power nap!

Thank you,
-Mista G Nerd

P.S. Because each cage has 5 Drives and each cage will be it's own vDev in the pool. Should I use RaidZ3 because it doesn't follow the RaidZ2 guideline, or is there another setup I haven't thought of.

 

[cyberjock]

I just go to supermicro.com and start shopping here. 95%+ of the motherboards are ECC only, so that really helps. Other than that, for Intel you can assume if it doesn't have a server chipset on the motherboard it doesn't support ECC.

 

[joelmusicman]

Hello,

I am completely new to freenas and I have a rudimentary understanding of RAID systems. For my build, I have a general focus of scalability in regards to HDD space. My current goal is to start with my finances targeted to the CPU/MOBO/RAM. I intend to add and upgrade my HDD's later.

My case will be the Cooler Master Storm Stryker SGC-5000W-KWN1, featuring 9x 5.25 Drive bays. When used with DataCage Classic MGB455SPF-B 5x3.5" in 3x5.25" Hot Swap HDD Cage, I will be able to fit 15x3.5 Drives in the tower.

Up until recently I was under the impression that a zpool cannot have hard drives added to increase space. Which would have been a problem for me because I intend to fill each cage at later dates as I do have a budget. I read part of the powerpoint provided by cyberjock and now believe I can add 5 hard drives at a time and create a new vDev, adding that vDev to the zPool. Meaning to get the system up and running I can start with the first cage of 5 HDD's being vDev1. At a later time I can add the next cage of 5 HDD's as vDev2, Increasing the overall storage space of my Pool.

My current Hard drives are of varying storage capacities. I assume this is a "strong as the weakest link" scenario. Wherein the maximum capacity used from each drive in a vDev is the same as the smallest capacity drive. For example I have 4 x 2TB drives and my 5th Drive is 350gb. The vDev will only read them as 5 x350gb drives until I upgrade the 5th. If mixing and matching sizes isn't going to cause problems for the machine, I intend to throw together 5 HDD's to get the system up and running then buy 4TB Drives later. This will allow me to focus more of my current budget on other hardware.

So this is my general plan thus far. Please if any one of my ideas/beliefs are misconceptions let me know and point me in the right direction. Now, onto my questions.

Right so far... as you said, don't add single HDDs to an existing pool as that will compromise your parity/cause a single point of failure.

How can I find Motherboards Suporting ECC? Websites that i've searched don't really let me filter by ECC. Tigerdirect will filter RAM by ECC support, but not MOBO's or CPU's. I don't really want to pick the first ECC MOBO I see. I prefer to shop around and weigh the spec's in my head.

Will upgrading RAM be a problem? I want to start with 16GB of RAM and upgrade or add more sticks in later.

I apologize if these questions are common, but i'm tired and am off to bed. I will continue reading cyberjocks guide and check back for responses after a power nap!

Thank you,
-Mista G Nerd

P.S. Because each cage has 5 Drives and each cage will be it's own vDev in the pool. Should I use RaidZ3 because it doesn't follow the RaidZ2 guideline, or is there another setup I haven't thought of.

95% of the motherboards in Newegg's "Server Motherboard" category are specified for ECC. Also note the use of "Registered" ram for motherboards as they are not cross-compatible with "Unbuffered" ram.

As far as CPUs, you can filter for ECC compatibility on Intel's ARK site. For the current platform (Socket 1150) your choices are: Pentium G3220, i3-4130 (adds AES-NI and hyperthreading), or any of the Xeon SKUs. Note that i5s and i7s are NOT ECC compatible.

 

[xMista_G_Nerdx]

Awesome! Thank you both for your assistance. I have one final question.

If each vDev I create contains 5 HDD's, should I use RaidZ2 or RaidZ3?

 

[joelmusicman]

ZFS "prefers" an even number of final drives for RAID configuration. That said, it won't be a deal killer if you run a 5 drive Z2, just maybe a minor performance hit.

My thoughts: to maintain optimal configurations and still have an upgrade path: a 6 drive Z2, and a 9 drive Z3. Your pick as to which one first... Bonus is that you'll get one extra drive's worth of space over 3 vdevs of 5 RAIDZ2s.

You could also run an 11 drive Z3 and then a 4 drive Z2.