FreeNAS Boot drive for other apps

[aasimenator]

Hi,

I am completely new to FreeNAS, i've watch a lot of videos on it though and have seen many FreeNAS builds, so when it came to upgrade our QNAP NAS as we were out of space, I thought we'd build a FreeNAS server instead.
We purchased a refurbished Dell 720xd with 12 x 3.5" bays and 2 x 2.5" Flex rear bays, we populated them with 8 x 4TB WD RED and 2 x 500GB Samsung SSD's

I installed FreeNAS on one of the 500GB SSD and then I've Mirrored the installation onto the other one so we have redundancy. I would like to use the rest of this space for other items like Apps / containers or Jails or VM etc. so that I get the speeds of the SSD. it wont be anything mission critical just for my testing stuff on it.

how do I configure that? right now we have not started using it yet so it wont be difficult to redo it if needed. Thanks in advance!

 

[Yorick]

See here. Also, this setup isn't going to get a lot of support, if any, from the community. https://www.ixsystems.com/community...-of-larger-ssds-for-boot-pool-and-data.81409/

8 x 4TB WD RED

I gotta ask: EFRX or EFAX? If EFAX, think long and hard about that, because DM-SMR.

 

[Redcoat]

Welcome to the forums!

I think you'll find what you are looking for here: https://www.ixsystems.com/community...-of-larger-ssds-for-boot-pool-and-data.81409/

This is the only authoritative reference I have seen here to making this (unsupported) boot drive configuration.

 

[aasimenator]

@Yorick Well we actually purchased the EFAX 4TB, they were 10$ costlier than EFRX ones and the only reason I got them was because the seller was giving all 8 drives we need while the EFRX seller was limiting to 3 drives. anyways they were bought before all the SMR & CMR fiasco so I didn't bother checking on it.

Is it really that bad? we'd only be storing backups on this system, daily backups of our entire network. Also the drives haven't arrived yet they are expected between 1st and 7th May, should I return them?

We switched to using WD Red's exclusively in our network for storage as the Seagate drives were unreliable to us for some reason and would fail within 3 years while WD Red's lasted us up to 4 / 5 years again they were EFRX I believe.

I will look into the link provided to setup the SSD's for boot and data.

 

[Yorick]

Is it really that bad?

Only you can answer that. The write speed should be around 40-60MB/s, and higher for small files like small incrementals. Where the rubber hits the road is resilver. I highly, highly recommend you fill the pool with enough dummy data to make it a real test, then zero one drive, and resilver it back in.

Best case: 4.5 to 5 days later, resilver is done
Worst case: Drive bombs out of raidz2 during resilver with hard errors

WD has been known to RMA EFAX drives for EFRX, for people who have severe performance issues in their NAS with EFAX. I'd do the test, make your decision, and if you decide to replace with EFRX, open a case with WD. Just don't wait too long, their stocks of EFRX won't last forever, either.

 

[aasimenator]

I think since we have not received the drives yet is a good thing then, this is not a home environment that I can spend time testing on, and use refurbished drives if it doesn't work out when we've paid in full. I think i'll email management, and ask them to apply for return and refund for the drives before we even install them in the servers, since they were just Amazon purchased, easy returns.

We'd be buying the drives I had originally chosen for this project Seagate IronWolf 4TB, Aamzon had crazy 3 drives per customer limit which is stupid IMHO who only buy 3 NAS drives.

Thanks again for your help. I will be searching through this forum and posting more questions as I go along, really enjoyed building this FreeNAS system.