SOLVED Am I using these disks to their full potential?

[davidcastellani]

Thank you for taking the time to read this and respond. I may use the wrong terms, and if I do, please correct me.

I have a FreeNAS server that is used for my home lab. Predominantly used for media storage and shared storage for my proxmox cluster, where I run mostly openvz containers. It is an old Intel Q6600 with 8GB of RAM, dual port intel NIC. I have a single zpool, with multiple datasets. The underlining disks are pairs(mirror) of equally sized disks.

2x 2TB
2x 2TB
2x 1TB
2x 1TB
2x 500GB

Each disk is connected to a PERC5i controller, with each disk in a raid0 single disk array.I know this is bad, hence why I am setting up a new FreeNAS box. I will have the above disks in addition to 2x 3TB drives. The new box will have 16GB of RAM, I will also be using a M1015 in IT mode for disk connectivity.

The new box can hold 10 disks. So I figure I will retire the 2x 500GB disks in favor of 2x 3TB disks. The 2x 3TB disks are going to be used to migrate only the necessary data off the current FreeNAS to the new one. Then I will take the disks out of the old one and move them into the new FreeNAS.

The new configuration would look like:

2x 2TB
2x 2TB
2x 1TB
2x 1TB
2x 3TB

Each disk in a mirror, with each pair being apart of a single zpool, with datasets to carve up the storage, and define quota's. I would be able to lose a single disk in each pair without losing any data. I am currently only using about 2TB of storage of the ~7TB available to me in the current configuration.

So my question is...

Am I using these disks correctly? Is there a better configuration to use them all in that gives me plenty of storage, but also disk redundancy. Maybe even better read performance?

P.S. Would using the current Q6600 as a backup device to my new FreeNAS make sense? Just use rsync to 1:1 mirror the new FreeNAS?

 

[Bidule0hm]

I think you've chosen the best configuration given the drives you have ;)

You can't have better performance than striped mirrors, but your network is more than likely the limiting factor anyway.

I recommend replication over rsync but rsync is fine too ;)

 

[cyberjock]

Please keep in mind that if you are rsyncing VM virtual disks that are "in use" when you are rsyncing the data, the destination files will be non-viable because the file will be changing while the rsync is in progress.