Best way to configure my drives

[mrtom82]

I'm hoping someone can help me figure out how I should configure my drives so I get the most performance.

I have an old Dell Dimension 9200 that I turned into my nas. It's a Core 2 Duo with 4gb ram. I also have an LSI SAS 9211-8i raid card installed and all of my hard drives are different sizes, models, etc. None of my drives are true sas drives. The card has a 2 sas ports and each port can host 4 sata drives using a sas to sata cable. The LSI card does not have it's own cache, just a processor.

Should I create a raid using the LSI card or should I create a striped volume in freenas? I also have a 60gb vertex 2 ssd and I was wondering if I should add that to the volume as a cache drive?

 

[survive]

HI mrtom82,

Here are my thoughts:

From what I can tell your controller is the LSI version of the IBM 1015 controller that's a favorite around here. You should be able to flash it to what's called "IT" mode to make in into a simple dumb controller which is what you want to use for zfs.

Your system is below the recommended minimum of RAM to use zfs, so you need to decide if you want to run zfs, if so look into getting more RAM for better performance & reliability.

The mix of drives complicates things. If you want to put them all into one pool the smallest drive sets the size of them all.

The single best thing you could do right now is read this:

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/slideshow-explaining-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

That will explain a lot of things you need to understand for how you are going to set up your storage.

In the meantime there's no reason you can't install FreeNAS and start poking around, just don't start moving data around until you have a plan for what you want to do.

-Will

 

[mrtom82]

HI mrtom82,

Here are my thoughts:

From what I can tell your controller is the LSI version of the IBM 1015 controller that's a favorite around here. You should be able to flash it to what's called "IT" mode to make in into a simple dumb controller which is what you want to use for zfs.

Your system is below the recommended minimum of RAM to use zfs, so you need to decide if you want to run zfs, if so look into getting more RAM for better performance & reliability.

The mix of drives complicates things. If you want to put them all into one pool the smallest drive sets the size of them all.

The single best thing you could do right now is read this:

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/slideshow-explaining-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

That will explain a lot of things you need to understand for how you are going to set up your storage.

In the meantime there's no reason you can't install FreeNAS and start poking around, just don't start moving data around until you have a plan for what you want to do.

-Will

Thanks for the info. I really want to make the most out of freenas and it looks like I can't do that with the dell since it only supports 4gb ram max. I've decided to use another computer that has 12gb ram. The link you posted is great and I can't wait to get this up and running.