Hard drive advice for 4+ hard drive setup

[phoba]

I have a n54l HP Microserver with which I hope to get a maximum amount of space and a certain amount of reliability.
I've recently had to backup all my data onto external drives after something went terribly wrong with my last setup, stemming from two faulty hard drives.

So now I have a 4TB WD Red, a 2TB drive, and am eventually planning on getting four 4TB drives, and even possibly expanding this to 6 drives in the future.

How can I set up zfs so that I can start using the system with my existing drives (both or just the 4TB) and have the possibility of expanding later on, all while ensuring the integrity of my data?

I appreciate any help on this :)

 

[skyline65]

I have 2 of the N54 servers, if you read this excellent guide it will help with setting it up.
http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

 

[phoba]

Thanks for the link! Did you end up using the 5.25-inch bay to squeeze more hard drives in? The examples I've seen using zfs seem to work best with at least 6 drives...

 

[skyline65]

No I didn’t bother. Im using ZFS2 with 4x3Tb WD red drives for my media server, although Im running out of space already! The other Proliant is running ZFS2 with 4 old 1.5tb Samsung drives which is an archive/backup of my work drives. The only problem Im having is the network connection does drop when copying files from my Hackintosh to the servers, whether with AFP or Samba. I had the same problem when copying from my Synology to my external drive whilst migrating the data. I think it is something to do with the Intel ethernet on the Hackintosh, so Im going to experiment with a separate ethernet card.

 

[anodos]

If you're starting with 4 drives and later want to move to 6 drives without recreating your pool, then the decision is fairly simple - mirrors.