Best use of small hard drives for archival storage.

[KenwoodFox]

Hi all!
I'm trying to set up an archive storage pool for replication tasks, and data that is only accessed infrequently. I have 16 drives now and will be updating to 24 drives. (500gb)

My previous plan was to create vdevs of 4 disks, and every four disks I collected I would expand the pool, each vdev used raidz1.
However I talked with some people online and I got kinda scared of raidz1, I want to ask, should I continue my current plan or do something else?

One of the things I am considering is creating 4 vdevs of 6 drives each in raidz2, and updating my pool every six drives. I'm curious to know that community thinks! Thank you so much for reading

 

[MikeyG]

Personally I would do between 6-8 drives of RAIDZ2 vdevs. You don't need the extra performance of multiple vdevs for archival storage, and RAIDZ2 is enough protection with 500GB drives and relatively short resilver times. Wider vdevs will also increase the storage efficiency of all those small drives.

 

[KenwoodFox]

Personally I would do between 6-8 drives of RAIDZ2 vdevs. You don't need the extra performance of multiple vdevs for archival storage, and RAIDZ2 is enough protection with 500GB drives and relatively short resilver times. Wider vdevs will also increase the storage efficiency of all those small drives.

Thank you so much for your advice, that sounds good to me and I liked that you mentioned that wider vdevs would be more efficient, its true I don't need extra speed performance :)

 

[MikeyG]

Also, I've found this to be super useful in calculating usable space: https://wintelguy.com/zfs-calc.pl

 

[KenwoodFox]

Also, I've found this to be super useful in calculating usable space: https://wintelguy.com/zfs-calc.pl

Thank you! I tried out the calculator, it looks like I'm on track to getting everything in place! Ill go with a 6 disk vdev, with RAIDZ2