Configuration Recommendation

[pokepoke]

I'm looking for some oversite and recommendations for how to configure the hardware I have.

Here is what I have:
Athlon 64 3000+
4GB ram (maxed out)
(3) 500GB SATA drives
(2) 1.5TB SATA drives
(1) 80GB SSD drive

My goals:
I want to store my Windows Home Server computer backups and video files on this NAS. I need about 1TB for backups and 1.5TB for videos currently. Ideally I would have redundancy protection for everything, but videos would be the priority. I would hope to be able to add larger drives to a pool in the future. I know I'm skimpy on ram for ZFS, but I really like the drive pooling. So what do I do?

 

[joeschmuck]

I see a pool of three 500GB drives (Raid-Z1) and a pool of two 1.5GB drives (RAID-Z1 or UFS mirror) and nothing for the SSD unless you wanted to try a ZIL. I guess the question is, can you connect all those hard drives to your computer at the same time?

If the videos are not that important then you could setup one of the 1.5GB drives just for videos and utilize the other as another data drive.

4GB is fine for ZFS, I ran it for a long time without a single hiccup.

My real suggestion to you is to give it a try, format the drives is different arrangements, place a copy of your data on the FreeNAS device and see how it works. Give it a few weeks to see if you like how you configured it and finally settle on what you like. Notice I said place a copy of your data on the FreeNAS device, do not delete your original data or you will not be able to reformat your drives without more pain in your life.

I would recommend using FreeNAS 8.0.3-Beta2 64-bit right this moment.

-Joe

 

[pokepoke]

Thanks Joe. You said pool the two 1.5TB drives as Z1, I thought I could only do that if I had 3 drives. If I mirror the two drives, will I be able to add a third drive and make it Z1 without overwriting the data?

 

[Stenull]

You could add all sata drives to one Z1 pool and exchange the small ones with bigger over time. when all 5 disks are 1.5TB (or bigger) the pool expands.
This vill give you 2 TB to start with and when all 500GB disk are replaced with 1.5TB you have 6TB.
Im doing this but with 4 disks..
As far as i know you can't take mirror disks and change them into Z1 without loosing data. And you can't grow your pools with more disks, just bigger disks.
You should consult documentation ;)

 

[joeschmuck]

The two 1.5TB drives is really mirrored ZFS drives and maybe I'm wrong in the first posting, wouldn't be the first time. I think the main thing to get from my posting is to try out what you have and don't settle on your first configuration, try other configurations just to see what you think of them and if they benefit you. Do not put all your data on here and remove it elsewhere. If something goes wrong, and it does happen, you would not be happy.

This is a good read and there are some others out there. It will help you with respect to ZFS. http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide

Once you settle on something you should come back and post what you did to arrive at your final results. Someone will find it useful.

-Joe