array from different sizes of disks

[Lacika1981]

Hi,

I would like to build a RAID array but I do not know what would be the best.
I have got 3 x 500GB HDD and one 2TB HDD.
I do not mind to loose space as I know to mirror two different size disks you can have the maximum size that the smallest disk has.
The best would be a RAID10 kind of solution.

The automatic selection want to build RAIDZ from the 3 500GB HDDs and ignores the 2TB HDD. I would like to build a RAID array from all of the disks.


Thank you

 

[joeschmuck]

Have you read this:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

After reading this then report your question about what you specifically want to do, for example that you want to use all four hard drives to create a RAIDZ (Z1) or you want to create a RAIDZ2, or you want to create two sets of MIRRORs and stripe across those which is basically a RAID10 (what you have asked for) but realize that all hard drives will be treated as the smallest sized hard drive in the setup, in otherwords your 2TB drive will look like a 500GB drive. Think about it, how could you mirror a 2TB drive and a 500GB drive, there isn't enough space on the 500GB drive to hold 2TB. Just wanting to make that clear. Or maybe you want to stripe across all the hard drives and if one drive fails, all data is gone.

Also I think you need to understand the storage capacity you will have once done, it will not be much. The 500GB drives are going to be limiting. If this is a platform that you are purely learning FreeNAS on the you will need to look into how the CLI works and the zfs and zpool commands work, you can Google those "create zfs pool stripe" for example and it should toss yo a bone.

If you want to really use this at home then I'd recommend you create a RAIDZ setup with all the hard drives and then replace the 500GB hard drives as you can afford to with a higher capacity drive. Once you replace all three 500GB drives to 2TB or larger then your pool will change reflect the smallest size drive capacity, in this senario it would be 2TB so all drives would be 2TB, a significant increase from 500GB.

 

[Lacika1981]

Thank you for your reply.

I have not read through the thread yet you have linked but will do as I checked it and I assume the PDF covers everything about the RAID levels.

As I wrote I do not mind to loose the capacity of the 2TB drive and using only 500GB of it. The best would be a RAID10 array. 2x 2 disks striped and these two arrays mirrored. I tried to create this but could not. I can stripe two disks but I could not mirror the two arrays. Will I be able to do via CLI?(Have not checked it yet)

 

[joeschmuck]

You will be able to create what you want via the CLI. It doesn't show up in the GUI because the GUI was dumbed down a long time ago to prevent users from do this and complaining that it wasn't a normal configuration. So you can do this via CLI. Read the link I provided you, there is a lot of good data in the presentation. Use your internet search engine (I like Google) to find help, it works 1000% better than the forum search function.