Hi,
I've just ordered all the components for my first FreeNas file server but I have a few questions regarding optimal pool set up. I have capacity in my case for 8 hdds + nvme boot drive. As such, i have ordered 9x 8tb WD Red drives (one cold spare) and have now started thinking about pool setup. I believe my sensible options are RaidZ2, RaidZ3 and mirrors. I have heard of a term striped mirrors, but i really am not sure what that means. My data is separated into entertainment media (backups of dvd's and blurays) and personal media/documents. It is critical that the personal media/documents remains safe, but the entertainment media can be lost (would be annoying and a waste of time).
I already have a local backup of the personal media, as well as a cloud backup, but will be further protecting the entire FreeNas server by duplicating to another remote location eventually. Given that i have multiple backups, and don't mind potential long resilver times*, i'm guessing that RaidZ2 is probably my optimal balance between redundancy and storage capacity.
*I really don't know how long the resilver times would actually be. Whilst I could tolerate 2-3 days of downtime, i'm not how happy the family would be!
1. Do you agree RaidZ2 is my optimal solution here?
2. Does an 8 drive RaidZ2 even make sense?
3. To confirm, with RaidZ2, i can withstand up to 2 drives failing before full data loss?
4. Given i have two different sets of data, would it make sense to set up datasets for this?
5. Can ZFS do duplication per dataset or just per pool?
6. Performance wise, RaidZ2 would be only as fast as the slowest drive? Does this mean i would struggle running more than 1 stream (not transcoded) of Bluray?
Thanks for the advice in advance
Pete
I've just ordered all the components for my first FreeNas file server but I have a few questions regarding optimal pool set up. I have capacity in my case for 8 hdds + nvme boot drive. As such, i have ordered 9x 8tb WD Red drives (one cold spare) and have now started thinking about pool setup. I believe my sensible options are RaidZ2, RaidZ3 and mirrors. I have heard of a term striped mirrors, but i really am not sure what that means. My data is separated into entertainment media (backups of dvd's and blurays) and personal media/documents. It is critical that the personal media/documents remains safe, but the entertainment media can be lost (would be annoying and a waste of time).
I already have a local backup of the personal media, as well as a cloud backup, but will be further protecting the entire FreeNas server by duplicating to another remote location eventually. Given that i have multiple backups, and don't mind potential long resilver times*, i'm guessing that RaidZ2 is probably my optimal balance between redundancy and storage capacity.
*I really don't know how long the resilver times would actually be. Whilst I could tolerate 2-3 days of downtime, i'm not how happy the family would be!
1. Do you agree RaidZ2 is my optimal solution here?
2. Does an 8 drive RaidZ2 even make sense?
3. To confirm, with RaidZ2, i can withstand up to 2 drives failing before full data loss?
4. Given i have two different sets of data, would it make sense to set up datasets for this?
5. Can ZFS do duplication per dataset or just per pool?
6. Performance wise, RaidZ2 would be only as fast as the slowest drive? Does this mean i would struggle running more than 1 stream (not transcoded) of Bluray?
Thanks for the advice in advance
Pete