FreeNAS raid equivalent

[Supercookie]

I'm setting up a music server for sonos for my mom. I have 4 1TB and a 240gb ssd. the ssd is going to be cache and I want the 4 hard drives in RAID 10. After doing some searching I understand that FreeNAS uses ZFS and does not use RAID standards. What is the RAID 10 equivalent in FreeNAS? or should I go with a raid 5/6 equivalent. (I am partial to a full mirroring of drive because in my first pc I built I have 2 1TB drives in RAID 1 and 1 of them failed after 9+ months due to a power outage and I just unplugged the dead drive and my partition still had all of its data).

 

[Jailer]

Mirrors is what you want. And skip the cache drive for your use case, you won't need it. ZFS is very different than other file systems.

 

[Supercookie]

Do I add all 4 drives to the volume to make the 2 of them as back up and the other 2 striped together? and with the ssd I am planing on building a bigger NAS for my whole house for knightly backups and for a plex server should i use it s a cache for that instead?

 

[Jailer]

Do I add all 4 drives to the volume to make the 2 of them as back up and the other 2 stripped together?

You use the volume manager in the gui to create your mirror pool.

should i use it s a cache for that instead?

No. There are very few use cases where a home user needs a cache drive in FreeNAS. Like I said a "cache drive" is very different and doesn't serve the same purpose in FreeNAS/ZFS as it does for other applications.

 

[Arwen]

Instead of 2, 2 way Mirrored vDevs, (that's ZFS terminology for a 4 disk RAID-10), you can go with RAID-Z2. It gives you the same amount of storage, but, any 2 disks can fail and still no data loss. The caveat is that RAID-Z2 can be a bit slower for some things. It's all about what risk you want to take.

In some ways it's clumsy to use only 4 disks in a RAID-Z2 set, but if you replace the disks with larger ones, you can grow the pool without backing up and restoring. And during that grow's re-silver, you can lose a disk, and still not lose data.

So;

RAID-Z1 - Like RAID-5, loose 1 disk maximum
RAID-Z2 - Like RAID-6, loose 2 disks maximum
RAID-Z3 - Don't really have a standard, (some use RAID-7 for triple parity), loose 3 disks maximum

Read up on ZFS before you start using FreeNAS. It's way different that other file systems, RAID types and volume management software.

 

[Scharbag]

And you should avoid Z1 as resilver times can expose you to pool failure if a second drive gives up the ghost while being resilvered.

RaidZ2 will be PLENTY fast for home use and will provide excellent fault tolerance.

Cheers,