Best ZFS configuration

[DoctorKraz]

Greetings All -

I wanted to get some experienced opinions on setting up a FreeNAS box, as far as ZFS Configuration! This is for a home (mostly) media server, although I will use it to back up both mine and my wifes documents/pictures from our computers.

My hardware is an AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ and I have 8GB of non-ecc memory. ( This is an older pc, I'm hoping to use it for 12-18 months while I put money away for a the NAS Mini from iXsystems - unfortunately in a household with 3 teenagers, extra money is at a premium! )

The computer will have 4 x 3TB drives. I'm figuring that no matter what configuration, read performance won't be an issue ( I only have a 100mb network, so that will be the bottle neck there ). My concern is of course write performance.

If I use RaidZ1, the system will have 7.8 TB of free space... which is really tight with 8GB of memory.

If I use Mirroring, the system will have 5.4 TB of free space... which means memory won't be as much of a concern.

I definitely plan on using the Plex plugin - and wouldn't mind using a few of the others ( but want to be knowledgable of the risks of running those jails against performance ). Once its up and the data is loaded on it, I don't see heavy traffic coming from other computers writing to the FreeNAS on a regular basis.

So I would love some opinions from some experienced FreeNAS users!

On a side note - I have 2 external 3TB drives I would love to use as a local backup. What is the best FS to format them with so that I can plug them into the FreeNAS usb ports and copy to them? ( so it would be much faster than over the network ) - and I'm making an assumption that I can do that with a FreeNAS box.

So thanks in advance for your suggestions!
Chris

 

[cyberjock]

To be honest, I'd do RAIDZ2 and not do mirrors. RAIDZ2 protects you from *any* 2 disk failures while mirrors protects you from only 1 disk in each vdev.

As for getting data to the server, if you have 2 machines with Gb LAN you should just direct-connect them and move the data over from your desktop.

You can import NTFS and ext2 partitions from the FreeNAS WebGUI. You can also import UFS and ZFS, but these are basically exclusive to less common OSes and if you use those you'd probably be able to answer the question yourself. ;)

I will warn you though, non-ECC is dangerous and AMDs have been known to be very problematic. I'm not sure if you've tried to use FreeNAS on your hardware. If not you should give that a try. There's a chance you won't even be able to get the dang thing to boot FreeNAS which would obviously be a dealbreaker and you'd no longer have to concern yourself with FreeNAS.

 

[diedrichg]

I second everything cyberjock mentioned.

In my setup I have an external NTFS drive that's in an external USB3.0 enclosure. I connect it to my desktop and I run Goodsync every month. My server is mounted as drive but you can also do SFTP connections with most sync software. I would use rsync but my wife has some files that have special characters in the file name and rsync changes them so that the file names are no longer readable. Goodsync does not discriminate and copies the special characters. I've not had luck with SyncBack Free (connection errors) and FreeFileSync will crash during the sync.

 

[DoctorKraz]

First and foremost - thank you both for responding - your information was valuable!

cyberjock: Lucky for me in this grand experiment, the AMD processor seems to work just fine. I have an 8GB microSD card with the FreeNAS 9.2.1.5 I installed on it, and it booted up just fine. Thanks to your advice, I skipped the default mirror option when I was configuring my zfs volume, and made it raidZ2. I now have 5.2 TB I am currently (slowly) copying my data to. Unfortunately, the NIC in my NAS box is 100mb - so that will be the first upgrade I make ( along with upgrading the one in my main pc ). Also wanted to say great job on the FreeNAS Mini review - definitely will be making that my next NAS solution.