Assembling a home NAS

[imagineinspire]

Hello Everybody,

I'm new on the NAS world and I want to build a 540Tb home NAS based on FreeNAS.

Here's my hardware :
1 x Supermicro SSG-6048R-E1CR24H
2 x SuperChassis 846BE1C-R1K03JBOD
56 x Western Digital Gold edition WD101KRYZ 10Tb storage
1 x TP LINK TL-SG1024 1Gbs switch

With this configuration I want to build only one "network shared disk" with 540 Tb, I recently saw that it can be possible for me to use JBOD this is why I choose the superChassis.

Is this configuration good for this purpose? if yes, what kind of file system can I use?

Thank you very much in advance.

 

[Ericloewe]

Uhmm... Are you quite sure about this? You want your first NAS to be an 8U monster with 56 10TB disks?

I mean, the server is okay, assuming it's specced with enough RAM for the workload. The only gripe I have with it is that it includes an SAS3108 controller instead of an SAS3008, which would be cheaper and more appropriate...

However, there are several things here that give me pause:

if yes, what kind of file system can I use?

FreeNAS only supports ZFS. There are no alternative filesystems (not that you'd want one).

one "network shared disk" with 540 Tb

Assuming you mean Terabytes (TB) and not Terabits (Tb), that is literally impossible with 56 10TB disks. The absolute maximum amount of storage you can squeeze out of those is ~509TB and that is with absolutely no redundancy.
If you mean it in a more abstract "54 disks' worth of data and two disks' worth of parity", that is also a disaster. The last person with a 50-wide RAIDZ2 vdev couldn't replace disks faster than they were failing. RAIDZ vdevs simply cannot be nearly that wide (~10 disks maximum per vdev). And all that is without even considering that you should keep the pool below 80% full, at best.

So, for a sane configuration that gives you at least 540 TB of space, you'd need 10 10-wide RAIDZ2 vdevs with 10 TB disks (usable space ~570 TB), so nearly twice as many disks.

Finally, such a large system is not a very good idea as a first NAS.

 

[tvsjr]

Holy crap... 540TB? That's a lot of 8K pr0... err, video content. :D

But yeah, Eric has it right. Crawl, walk, run. Don't go from zero to light speed all at once.

 

[imagineinspire]

Thank you very much for your quick reply.

Holy crap... 540TB? That's a lot of 8K pr0... err, video content. :D

But yeah, Eric has it right. Crawl, walk, run. Don't go from zero to light speed all at once.

I already did a NAS on my HP G7 with 8 bay disks of 1.5TB, it's worked very good on FreeNAS 9,
but now we're talking about 56 10TB disks ... :D


I had another question about JBOD, can I use it with FreeNAS?
I'm not going to make redundancy in this configuration, I wonder if I can have another "same" configuration for this purpose in the future.

The problem is that I already bought all the hardware ...

I mean, the server is okay, assuming it's specced with enough RAM for the workload.

For this, it's 32GB RAM, I can upgrade to 128GB.

So for now I'm just waiting to be delivered.

What do you advise my to have the maximum capacity with this purpose, no need to worry about the disk failures or the redundancy, I'll do it the next year.

Thank you very much for your advice.

 

[tvsjr]

You can do JBOD... basically you create a bunch of vdevs consisting of one drive each. Just keep in mind that your chance for failure increases with every drive you add. Two drives? Risky, but potentially acceptable. 20 drives? You better be using it for caching of data that is completely replaceable, because you *will* drop a drive. And, configuring in this manner limits you to striped mirrors... if you want to add redundancy later, you can't go to RAID-Z without destroying the pool first. I would strongly advise you to consider something like 7x 8-drive RAID-Z2 vdevs.

I wouldn't try this with anything less than 64GB RAM, and more would be strongly preferred.