Best setup for these disks

[huseink52]

Hi Guys

Im taking the plunge with a HP Microserver N40L (8gb RAM) with the following disks:
1x 3TB
3x 1TB

My needs are 500GB of important data. 2TB of movies/shows that I plan to plex.

I was planning to use the 3x 1TB for important data, maybe in RAIDZ1 config. Then use the 3TB for movies/shows and an extra backup of the 500GB. Ill also have some offsite backup plan for the 500gb.

I've read up on all the basics and have a fair grasp on vdevs/zpools/raidz and ive setup and installed the machine and freenas is working and the disks are showing...just need to configure them.

Just wanted to get some opinions on the best configuration to get the most out of what i have.

 

[BigDave]

I was planning to use the 3x 1TB for important data, maybe in RAIDZ1 config. Then use the 3TB for movies/shows and an extra backup of the 500GB. Ill also have some offsite backup plan for the 500gb.

If I understand you correctly, you are going to have two pools?

If I were you, I would sell the 3TB drive and get two more 1TB drives and form a 5 drive RAIDz2 pool.
This config would provide more redundancy (read safer) and you could always replace each of the five drives
in the future to expand the capacity

 

[huseink52]

yes 2 pools.

I don't want to "waste" redundancy on the movies/shows storage hence keeping that in a separate non redundant pool and also using spare space on that as a backup for the RAIDz1 pool also.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

This is fine for your current plans. What it doesn't take into account is the likelihood that you'll want to grow your storage later. What you'll run into at that point is a decision between replacing the 1TB drives with larger drives and ending up with a setup that's considered risky for RAIDZ1, or destroying and rebuilding your pool. Just want to make sure you've considered this.

 

[joeschmuck]

I think your plan is almost sound actually. Let me justify it for you.

1) You are creating pool for non-important data such as videos using a single drive. While it's not efficient speed wise doing this, it's not critical either for streaming media and you are only talking about having just over 2.5TB of storage after formatting. And the data size is not that large that you couldn't back it up if you wanted to increase your pool structure at a later date.

2) Your pool of three 1TB drives, I'd change that to a RAIDZ2. You said this was critical data and you only needed 500GB, well this will provide the amount of data space you require while also providing good redundancy. Because the amount of data is so small it can easily be backed up to another device (hard drive on another computer) when/if the time comes where you want to create a larger pool by adding more drives.

So my advice is to adjust your plans and create a RAIDZ2 out of those three 1TB drives.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

So my advice is to adjust your plans and create a RAIDZ2 out of those three 1TB drives.

... by adding a fourth 1TB drive ;)

 

[joeschmuck]

Guess it could be three mirrors too.

 

[gpsguy]

Note, if you want to stuff 5-6 drives in your N40L, as some of the replies have suggested, you've got some extra work to do. First, you'd need to use one of the hacked BIOS mods to enable AHCI on the ODD and eSATA connections. To stack 2 - 3.5" drives in the ODD bay, some users used to use a "xwing?" adapter. I can't find it, but this looks like it would work - http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MM52T35/

Finally, depending on the drive sizes, etc. you might have to bump up your RAM to 16GB. Yes, you can put 16GB in the HP NxxL Microservers.