Can I mix Hard Drives

[NASRookie]

Hello! I am new to FreeNAS and have a question. I probably know the answer, but like to get your opinions. I have a spare PC that I would like to use FreeNAS on which has 4GB of ram a i5 CPU. My question is: I have 2 SATA 3 6GB ports and 6 SATA 2 ports (Hope that's what you call them) Can I buy 2 SATA 3 HDDs and 2 SATA 2 HDDs and will they work together with FreeNAS?

Hope this make sence lol!
Thanks for your help!

 

[jgreco]

as far as drive types go, why obsess over it? they probably only barely max out a sata-i port. but 4gb is too little memory for stable operation.

 

[NASRookie]

Ok all I wanna know will SATA 3 and SATA 2 work together?

 

[gpsguy]

yes

 

[pirateghost]

Ok all I wanna know will SATA 3 and SATA 2 work together?

you do NOT need to worry about what revision of SATA you have. SATA-I, II, and III work together...

 

[NASRookie]

OK cool! Thank you pirateghost & gpsguy. :)

 

[pirateghost]

And don't buy sata II just because you have some sata II ports. 3 is backwards compatible

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

[9C1 Newbee]

Using non-ecc ram presents a data corruption vulnerability with ZFS.

Using less than 8 gigs of memory is not really advisable. Having said that, I had a 9TB ZFS pool with 2 gigs. That was just asking for trouble and it was slow. I imagine with 4 gigs, you won't be asking for trouble as loudly and won't be as slow. The larger the pool, the larger the ram requirements. Thought I would point that out from one newb to another.

 

[NASRookie]

Good to know thanks I'll upgrade the ram to 8gb or more

 

[NASRookie]

Can I start with say 2-2TB drives, then add two more later on to add more storage?

 

[cyberjock]

Check out my presentation in my sig. That answers your question. Stickies.... your new best friend.

 

[NASRookie]

Thanks cyberjock, but it doesn't say how many drives you can start with. all I wanna know it can I start out with 2x2TB WD Red HDD's and add more later on.

Thanks

 

[cyberjock]

The manual tells you how many drives you need for the various vdev types.

Sorry, I was under the impression you already read the manual and was concerned about expansion.

 

[alfredperlstein]

Hey Rookie, 2 drives are fine. You can configure that in any number of configurations. You probably want to setup a mirror for redundancy.

You can expand later, but you'll probably want to do so in pairs of drives. At a certain point you if you keep going you'll want to dump and restore to possibly raidz2 to reclaim the space lost to redundancy to mirroring.

 

[NASRookie]

Thank you alfredperlstein! Is Raidz2 hard to set up? I'm real green to this stuff, and would like to learn how. I just have to add 4 more GB of ram and buy 2x2TB HDD's when funds are available.

Thanks again for you input!

 

[cyberjock]

NASRookie,

I'd appreciate it if you'd ask 1 question per thread. The manual goes through the screens of how to setup ZFS for various configurations. Feel free to install FreeNAS in a VM and play with it before putting it on hardware.

 

[NASRookie]

Alright then

 

[alfredperlstein]

Hey NASRookie, raidz2 is easy to setup, just go into the volume manager and keep adding disks to a single stripe then pick raidz2 from the drop down.

I think you need a minimum of 4 disks per raidz2 though, so right now with only 2 disks available you'll need to make a zvol mirror. When you add your additional disks those can be another mirror. You'll get decent redundancy with a 2xmirror config, however you can only lose one disk per mirror where with a raidz2 you can lose any two disks and you should be fine.

 

[NASRookie]

Thank you Alfred that helps a lot! Can't wait to get my FreeNAS up and running, hopefully next week.

Thank again!

 

[Richman]

Using non-ecc ram presents a data corruption vulnerability with ZFS.

Using less than 8 gigs of memory is not really advisable. Having said that, I had a 9TB ZFS pool with 2 gigs. That was just asking for trouble and it was slow. I imagine with 4 gigs, you won't be asking for trouble as loudly and won't be as slow. The larger the pool, the larger the ram requirements. Thought I would point that out from one newb to another.

I don't understand that because it would make more sense it the RAM requirments were contingent on mow many user clients were logging onto the NAS at one time requesting data. In other words, I have heard of the 1GB per TB rule, but if you had an 8TB array and were using it for a home NAS streaming media with one user at a time and on a rare occasion maybe two, why wouldn't 4GB work without those issues. And to further the scenario, if you had the same at home NAS, 1-2 users, but it was a 16TB NAS, why would you need 16GB or RAM?