FreeNAS Re-Setup

[Sty]

Howdy y'all! I am going to be re-setting up a long standing FreeNAS Z-Pool. I'm bringing in 6 new and larger hard drives over the next few months. However I want to probably redo my pool. Originally I had an encrypted pool but I no longer need that overhead. I also want to make sure that I'm using the best compression algorithms given types of storage. Finally, I want to make sure that I'm doing the best / most logical setup. Without further ado, here are my specific questions.

1. For a 6-disk setup, which is better? RaidZ2 or RaidZ1+0 (I think this is the correct term for 2 RaidZ1 3-disk setups in striped mode?) I will be buying basically one disk every 2-3 months then swapping in (and if running striped pools would swap alternating pools).
2. Does it make sense to use gzip-8 or other compressions for things like cold storage? My specific non-lz4 cases that I'm thinking of is actual cold storage such as long-term backups, time machine backups for Macs, and maybe things like digital photos and movies for a plex server.
3. I am upgrading to 8TB drives and have roughly 8TB of data now. I'm limited to 6 bays and connectors on the machine. I'm thinking about pulling one my current drives (RaidZ2 setup) then plugging in the new drive as a new ZFS pool. Then, I would copy paste between pools to save the data. Finally, I'd pull the drive, plug in the original, and redo the pool in the configuration that answers question 1. Finally, I'd pull a drive, and copy/paste the data back. Then, final finally I would replace the missing drive with the new 8TB and wait to resilver (then slowly plug in and replace the current 2TB drives with new ones). Is this a good game plan? Am I missing steps? Does someone have a well documented set of steps to do this?

Thank y'all so much!

 

[Sty]

Follow-up question: if I want encrypted later am I able to add an encrypted dataset or will I need more drives / another pool? Thanks!

 

[dlavigne]

Did you decide upon a solution?

 

[pschatz100]

Howdy y'all! I am going to be re-setting up a long standing FreeNAS Z-Pool. I'm bringing in 6 new and larger hard drives over the next few months. However I want to probably redo my pool. Originally I had an encrypted pool but I no longer need that overhead. I also want to make sure that I'm using the best compression algorithms given types of storage. Finally, I want to make sure that I'm doing the best / most logical setup. Without further ado, here are my specific questions.

1. For a 6-disk setup, which is better? RaidZ2 or RaidZ1+0 (I think this is the correct term for 2 RaidZ1 3-disk setups in striped mode?) I will be buying basically one disk every 2-3 months then swapping in (and if running striped pools would swap alternating pools).
2. Does it make sense to use gzip-8 or other compressions for things like cold storage? My specific non-lz4 cases that I'm thinking of is actual cold storage such as long-term backups, time machine backups for Macs, and maybe things like digital photos and movies for a plex server.
3. I am upgrading to 8TB drives and have roughly 8TB of data now. I'm limited to 6 bays and connectors on the machine. I'm thinking about pulling one my current drives (RaidZ2 setup) then plugging in the new drive as a new ZFS pool. Then, I would copy paste between pools to save the data. Finally, I'd pull the drive, plug in the original, and redo the pool in the configuration that answers question 1. Finally, I'd pull a drive, and copy/paste the data back. Then, final finally I would replace the missing drive with the new 8TB and wait to resilver (then slowly plug in and replace the current 2TB drives with new ones). Is this a good game plan? Am I missing steps? Does someone have a well documented set of steps to do this?

Thank y'all so much!

My opinion:

1) With a 6 disk RAIDZ2, you can lose any two disks before you lose data. With two 3 disk RAIDZ1 volumes striped, you can lose one disk from each volume, but if you lose two disks from either volume then you lose your data. The six disk RAIDZ2 is more fault tolerant. The second option will have somewhat better write performance but will be somewhat less fault tolerant. For most uses, the 6 disk RAIDZ2 will be the better choice.

2) No. Your biggest files will be the media files, and they are already compressed.

3) Obviously, you don't have a separate backup. Remember, RaidZ configurations are not a substitute for a backup. You are already spending a lot of money on disks. If it were me, I would buy one more 8 TB drive, and keep it as a backup of your original data. However, you can do what you suggested but you need to be very careful that you don't mess something up.

 

[danb35]

if I want encrypted later am I able to add an encrypted dataset

No, not at this time. Once ZFS encryption makes its way into FreeBSD from ZFS on Linux, this is likely to change, but at this point, the only option is disk-level encryption. If you're handy with GELI, you could probably convert the pool to encrypted at the CLI, but I wouldn't know where to start with that.