Disk Config for my setup?

[MikiiTakagi]

Hello! Im gonna start by saying that English is my second language. There gonna be a lot of errors in my text and im sorry for it. First just as an introduction, im currently studying to become an IT, and almost done with my school. But well it not that great.. im learning more outside of school and they actually didn't teach me a lot of new thing to be honest! There's one specific project I made that helped me a lot, my Home Server. So here my setup:

Spec:
CPU: i9-7900x
Motherboard: Asus TUF x299 MARK 2
Ram: Corsair 64Gb
GPU: MSI GTX 970
Additional peripheral: adapter for 8 more sata port (Actually 7 one specific port make freenas crash on start probably broken)
Additional peripheral: Network card for 2 more port.
Case: Rosewill RSV-L4500

That mainly what I use briefly. I currently run ESxi on a sata port on the motherboard. The thing i noticed is that if i want to passthrough the sata from the board it need to be the full controller(not possible since my ssd with my OS is on one of the port). I recently got a NVME to replace my ssd and free the sata port. Now to the point i need to transfert everything to the new disk, I noticed the bad configuration I made early on my FreeNas. I simply added disk after another like an extend without thinking about it. Now that im starting again, I would like to make a nice configuration and easy to work with! Here my old setup(at least how im able to explain it)

Total disk: (not all plugged in)
5x western digital red 8tb
4x western digital red 3tb
2x 1tb (from reused disk)
2x western digital blue 500gb(reused too)

Right now i have 3 network drive, Movie, Tv Shows and Temp. Everything is backup on other drive(did it recently to format everything currently on my setup) I would like to have multiple network drive (No raid needed) and then another drive with raid for important file. I don't really care if i lose my movies and tv show are lost on disk failure. But the one on raid gonna have important file inside like all my programming project and documents.
Like i said early i didnt really learn in school and hard drive configuration exept the very base is not my speciality... I would like some help to understand how to setup my drive to have everything setup. Im using a Windows VM with plex for media and other computer to access it too. The best would be to have everything for my media on a single network drive and another drive for my important file. But i dont want to kinda split everything on every drive. is it possible to logically extend my drive so when i lose one only some file is lost and not all the disk?
If more information is needed i can provide more simply ask! I really want to understand how to work correctly with FreeNas but i dont know where to start!
Thanks everyone!

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

Hey @MikiiTakagi. Glad you're finding building a server a good learning experience. Half the reason I built my first FreeNAS box was to learn!

A couple thing I think are worth mentioning.

Additional peripheral: adapter for 8 more sata port (Actually 7 one specific port make freenas crash on start probably broken)

Are you running FreeNAS on this machine? And if so what exact card are you using? Some people have had issues with cards not playing nicely with FreeNAS and resulting in data loss. This can be especially dangerous if your pool has many single-disk vdevs; if any single of those vdevs fails you lose your pool.

But i don't want to kinda split everything on every drive. is it possible to logically extend my drive so when i lose one only some file is lost and not all the disk?

FreeNAS drives are used to build vdevs. Vdevs are used to build pools. When you write data to the pool you don't get to pick which vdev or drive the data goes to. It gets stored on the pool and the specifics of how are managed by ZFS to ensure data protection as best as possible given your setup.

From what you described, I think you're saying you are interested in . . .
1. A pool which prioritizes maximal storage where the data does not matter
2. A pool which prioritizes redundancy for important data

Maximal Storage
You can just build many single-drive vdevs and use those vdevs to build a large pool. However, be careful! If any single vdev in a pool fails the entire pool fails. In this setup if any single drive fails you lose the entire pool; all of it. So even though you may not care about your movies THAT much, maybe you do care about your time. If you use 4 or 5 disks to build a pool like this any single one of them can fail. The more drives you add the more likely a failure is and the more likely you are to have to rebuild your data.

Redundancy
For this I would suggest mirrored vdevs or RAIDZ2. Which you choose depends on your use cases, how many drives you have, and how much storage you need. A common RAIDZ2 setup is to have 6-disks in each vdev. In this configuration 1/3 of the space is used for parity leaving you 2/3 for storage. Mirrored vdevs give you 1/2 for parity and 1/2 for storage.

It may be worth it for you to look up the performance characteristics of mirrored vdevs vs RAIDZ2 to make that choice. There are a lot of useful documents in the resources section that will be useful guides.

 

[SweetAndLow]

With your random assortment of drives you are doing to want to use a mirror'ed vdev layout. It will give you good flexibility and performance. There are lots of other issues with your setup but you didn't ask about that stuff so I'll let it be.

 

[MikiiTakagi]

Could you give me more insight on which issues my setup have? Im currectly reading documentation for the information PhiloEpisteme told me. Since im almost restarting from scratch I would like to make it the best way possible!

 

[SweetAndLow]

Could you give me more insight on which issues my setup have? Im currectly reading documentation for the information PhiloEpisteme told me. Since im almost restarting from scratch I would like to make it the best way possible!

1. Cpu does not support ecc memory
2. Motherboard is a little strange.
3. What sata card do you have? Basically zero of them work. You need a hba.
4. What network adapter? What wing with the internal one? I can't find any spec about your motherboard. Only certain nics work well.
5. Your virtualizing it? That has lots of gotchas.
6. Creating multiple pools is not common practice even though people do it. I would avoid multiple pools.