I had asked earlier about upgrading my NAS about a month ago and recently bought a used Poweredge 2950 with 8GB of ECC memory and 4x 2TB WD Reds for a Raid-Z2 array. I am about to setup my initial configuration and was wondering if enabling compression and encryption on my volumes would be worth it in the long run. I would assume that compression would take a fair hit to read/write speeds and I would only save a few gigs by enabling it but I just wanted to make sure before I transfer 2TB of data over to my new NAS. Another question I had was involving using some drives as cache, the used server I bought included two 146gb 15k SAS drives and I was wondering if it was practical for me to use those in my NAS for cache or if it would bottleneck my array. Also, I wanted to make sure I should keep with my plan to software raid in FreeNAS rather than using my built in perc 5i raid card in my server. Thanks for the advice!
Edit: I also wanted to ask about backup services, because if I were to backup my old NAS to some sort of cloud service (I have "decent" internet so only about 48hr transfer time) I could upgrade my planned Raid-Z2 array to a 6 drive array as I had purchased a separate drive as a hotspare.
Edit: I also wanted to ask about backup services, because if I were to backup my old NAS to some sort of cloud service (I have "decent" internet so only about 48hr transfer time) I could upgrade my planned Raid-Z2 array to a 6 drive array as I had purchased a separate drive as a hotspare.
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