About RAID

[InGenetic]

dear all, I need some information and advice if i want to build freenas box with large hdd quota for example 4TB - 6TB, which the safety and best raid that i shoud use ?

now i'm using 2TB ( 2 pcs ) with raid 1, but i need more space 2TB is not enough because it will be used by 60 users..

Thanks n regards,

Ernest

 

[danb35]

Not enough information to answer your question. If I'm understanding your post correctly, you want 4-6 TB of net storage capacity, correct? What kind of data will you be storing? How many of your users will be accessing it at the same time? How critical is the data--how much redundancy do you need?

 

[InGenetic]

Dear danb35,

Really sorry for late respon,
1. you want 4-6 TB of net storage capacity, correct? It's correct at least 4TB
2. What kind of data will you be storing? Ms office file, dwg - CAD file (not much),the most of all is excell file
3. How many of your users will be accessing it at the same time? 100 user
4. How critical is the data--? That's my users file doing their job everyday. I will made a backup for them freenas to freenas.
5. how much redundancy do you need? I sorry, whats redundancy ? N how to count on it ? Percentage ? Like SLA connection ?

Regards,

 

[InGenetic]

A little information now I setup with 2 hdd (mirror) raid 1, but 2TB i need 4TB, if i made 2 hdd 4TB, i'm not sure i can get that hdd as i know around my place the biggest hdd is 3TB,

 

[danb35]

Well, the goalposts are shifting--in your original post you said 60 users, now you're saying 100 users will be using the server at the same time. Nonetheless, you have a couple of options:

• You could add a pair of 3 TB disks to your pool as another mirror. This would expand the capacity of your volume to about 5 TB (4.5 TiB), and still protect you in the event of a disk failure. If both of the disks in either mirror failed, though (i.e., both of the 2 TB disks, or both of the 3 TB disks), you'd lose all the data on your pool and need to restore from backup.
• You could back up your data, destroy the pool, and create a new RAIDZ2 pool with your existing 2 TB disks and two new 3 TB disks. This new pool would have a capacity of about 4 TB (3.6 TiB), and could be expanded to 6 TB (5.4 TiB) by later replacing the 2 TB disks with 3 TB disks. This would protect your data in the event of any two disk failures.

In either case, with 60-100 users, performance is likely to be an issue. What are your hardware specs? I don't have experience with an environment with that many users, but maybe someone else can chime in.