Effective archiving of media files

[cyris212]

So I've installed FreeNAS onto my Old Machine (i7 860, Dual GLAN, 16GB Non-ECC RAM) to test freenas for a longer period off time (6 Months). I got hooked and started to love jails and zfs...

Long story short I want to build/buy something reliable that will hold all my media files and host PyLoad, PLEX and OwnCloud. I had a look at the FreeNAS Mini from iXsystems but 8TB (RAIDZ2 or RAID10) aren't enough for my needs. So my questions are...

1.) Since most of the files are movies is there something I can do with compression so I get more out of my disks?

2.) Could I use the FreeNAS mini with 6TB Disks?

3.) Is there a downside using larger Disks with non-parity RAID Levels like 1 or 10?

Thanks!

 

[danb35]

Video files aren't going to be very compressible, so I'd expect the answer to (1) to be no. I don't see any reason why you couldn't use 6TB disks with the mini. You could configure the mini with 4x 6TB disks in RAIDZ1 (with ~ 18TB net capacity), but you're at a greater risk of data loss than if you were to choose RAIDZ2 (~12TB net capacity). You could even just stripe the disks (~24TB net capacity), but that would give you no redundancy, and would result in complete loss of your pool when any one of your disks failed.

Or, you could use the same motherboard used in the FreeNAS Mini and install it in a case with 6 or 8 bays.