Best options for the drives that I have

[jordanthompson]

Hi all,
I currently have a ReadyNAS with four 3TB drives. I have an additional 8 2TB drives that I can use for my TrueNAS server. I also have 2 4TB drives that I use to back up the ReadyNAS. These drives are all more-or-less acceptable for RAID use (at least by my standards ;-)

Some concerns:
* The 3TB drives are currently occupied on the ReadyNAS. Once the TrueNAS is up and running and the data copied over, I could move them and sliver them in one at a time.
* I want to run the TrueNAS at RAID RAIDZ2 to give me decent hardware redundancy (see my comment on the drives above ;-)
* I'd like to keep a drive or two around that I swap periodically for backups (currently the 4TB drives)
* I think I'd like to keep the number of drives to a minimum to reduce heat and power consumption
* I currently need around 5TB of usable data
* This is a home server for my wife and me, but we have a lot of photographs
* I want to run a database (presumably in a jail)
* I think I want to run Plex server (in a jail)

I have plenty of SATA ports available and I have enough hot-swap slots to add up to 8 drives total (4 used in the current pool)
What would you recommend to be the optimal configuration of drives?

TrueNAS CORE
Platform: Generic

Version:
TrueNAS-12.0-U8

16GB RAM
AMD FX(tm)-8150 Eight-Core Processor
8 threads

 

[sretalla]

First thing since you haven't been specific is that you may have SMR disks based on those sizes...

List of known SMR drives

Hard drives that write data in overlapping, "shingled" tracks, have greater areal density than ones that do not. For cost and capacity reasons, manufacturers are increasingly moving to SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording. SMR is a form of PMR...

www.truenas.com

ZFS is (it would seem) new for you, so head over to the resources section and look for the ZFS primer and basic materials to help you understand it (and the associated terminology and limitations).

Once the TrueNAS is up and running and the data copied over, I could move them and sliver them in one at a time.

Not sure what you mean by this, but RAIDZ expansion isn't yet available, so you're stuck to the VDEV width you start with in RAIDZ2.

You could add an additional RAIDZ2 VDEV to the pool if that makes sense for you.

I'll leave the rest of the research to you and am ready to follow on with questions. It does sound like your described use-case will be mostly OK with RAIDZ2, but if your database is heavily used (IOPS), then you might want to run your data (or the whole jails dataset) on an SSD/mirror.