Change Pool Setup when going from 2 to 4 Drives?

[Stylesetter]

Hi guys,

i want to turn my old gaming PC into NAS with the goal of having a fast and redundant shared drive that both my wife and i can access from the network. We will be storing mostly pictures and videos. Additionally it would nice if i could efficiently edit videos with the files that are located on the NAS, especially remotely when i am not in my home network.

My plan is to buy 2 WD Red Plus 4TB drives and start with a RAID1, i guess this would be a mirror in TrueNAS. And i want to use my old NVMe drive as a L2ARC cache. And eventually i would like to buy two more drives and add them to the setup and make a RAID5 setup because from my research this should give me the fastest write/read speeds.

A couple of questions:
1. After adding two more drives can i easily turn the RAID1 into a RAID5 setup by converting the setup to striped mirrors?
2. How would i go about configuring the change to striped mirrored pools?
3. Can i dual boot Windows just in case i need to use this pc as a desktop or will Windows have problems with the raid drives and nmve drive that has been used as L2ARC cache?
4. Could i leave my old GPU in the setup or will this just increase my electricity bill unnecessarily?
5. Are there any changes/upgrades i should consider for this setup to vastly improve performance?

PC Specs:
RAM: D4 8GB 2133-14 fury black k2
CPU: intel core i5-6600k
Motherboard: Asus z170 Pro Gaming Z170
NVME Drive: Crucial P1 M.2 1TB
Drives: WD Red Plus 4 TB

 

[Nick2253]

Welcome to the TrueNAS forums!

I'd suggest that you start with a read through of the Terminology and Abbreviations Primer. There are a few terms that you are using incorrectly, and I think that would help ground you as you head down this path. After all, if we're not talking the same language, how can we ever hope to get to a mutual understanding?

As for your questions:

After adding two more drives can i easily turn the RAID1 into a RAID5 setup by converting the setup to striped mirrors?

RAID5 is not remotely the same as striped mirrors. RAID5 is a parity RAID level, where one drive's worth of space is used for parity calculations. This allows you to lose one whole drive and your array would still be functional. The equivalent to RAID5 in ZFS land is RAIDZ1. Striped mirrors is closest to RAID10, which is a nested raid level of RAID0 on top of RAID1.

In ZFS world, a pool automatically stripes data across all the vdevs in the pool. This means that if you have a mirrored pair vdev in your pool, you could easily add another mirrored pair vdev. However, do note that data on the original vdev will *not* be striped across the new vdev. This means that you may not realize the benefits of your extra performance until you've re-written the data to your pool.

Can i dual boot Windows just in case i need to use this pc as a desktop or will Windows have problems with the raid drives and nmve drive that has been used as L2ARC cache?

Short Answer: no, you can't dual boot.

Long Answer: theoretically you can, but I would strongly suggest that it's not worth your time to try and figure it out. Furthermore, a dual boot system and TrueNAS are so far apart in the "expected use case" categories that you'd probably be trying to figure all that out singlehandedly, since I can't imagine that anyone has done that before.

Could i leave my old GPU in the setup or will this just increase my electricity bill unnecessarily?

Just increase your electricity bill.

Are there any changes/upgrades i should consider for this setup to vastly improve performance?

An L2ARC is likely unnecessary for your use case. If you really want to improve performance, add as much RAM as your system will allow.

Do note that running a 24/7 server on older gaming-grade hardware is usually a recipe for disaster (or at least disappointment). You'll get everything set up, and it will work fine for a year or two, but then it will start getting wonky in weird ways, and there's a possibility of data loss or data errors. For most people who want to make the investment in ZFS, the value is its crazy high data integrity options because the integrity of their data is the most important thing. However, just protecting data at rest (ZFS) if a half-measure if you're not also protecting data in transit (ECC, quality power, quality NIC, etc).

 

[Stylesetter]

Thanks for your quick reply! I will definately look at the primer, eventhough i have been going through many forum posts and the TrueNAS documentation i am not quite confident on some terms :)

I made a mistake in my first question, i meant to say turning Raid 1 to Raid10, not Raid5. Sorry about that.
Your answer to that question was really helpful nonetheless!