Hard drive configuration advice

[Johnpants]

Good morning all,

New to the forum, but I have been using FreeNAS now for about 2 years. A guy I used to work with introduced me to it, along with Plex and have been happily using it to share my media with family and a couple of friends trouble free, until yesterday.

I came home to a clicking noise coming from the server and instantly knew one of the drives was in a bad way. Upon inspection it has died, I've done my best to try and revive it short term but no joy.

I've done some reading and now realise that it was configured to be striped (RAID0 equivalent?) and losing that drive means i've lost everything (luckily all important files were backed up separately). After a couple of hours crying i've come accept this now and looking to move on.

The server spec is fine for handling everything, essentially it is just a NAS box. I host Plex on a different machine. My issue is where I go moving forward to ensure redundancy should a drive fail again and hoping someone here is kind enough to confirm I am heading in the right direction or if i'm making a mistake.

So my server has 6 SATA connections and I was running the following:
1x320GB drive as an OS drive
1x2TB + 2x1TB striped in 1 vol(vdev?)

My next plan is to remove the 320GB drive and put the OS on a USB flash drive, freeing up all 6 connections for storage, and the following configuration for the disks:

1x3TB + 1x1TB vol1
1x3TB + 1x1TB vol2

Now, I want these to be mirrored so that should I lose a disk in either vol (i'm only planning on redundancy for 1 disk loss) I can just replace that disk and everything will keep running. At the same time I want to be able to add extra disks in the future to the 2 spare slots to expand, and possibly replace the 1TB disks with larger ones. This is where my knowledge falls short and any advice would be greatly appreciated. From reading I understand that I can't add a disk to a vdev, and i'm not planning on adding to it for a while, but just for futureproofing, what configuration would allow me to add the extra disks and still keep the required redundancy. I know i'll need to add 2 of the same size, but actually including them in to the vol, or zpool is the bit i'm unsure of.

Many thanks for reading and any advice will be greatly appreciated.

John.

 

[Chris Moore]

Your use of terminology is broken, but we can get you started for the future.
You need to make all the drives into a single storage pool.
The two 3TB drives can be a mirror vdev, then you can have two more mirror vdevs using the 1TB drives. This will give you three mirror vdevs in a single storage pool.
It is not what I would consider ideal, but it's pretty simple to do it and you can add another mirror vdev to extend the pool later.
It also allows you to replace one drive at a time in a mirror set and when both drives in a mirror are larger, the pool will automatically expand.

 

[Chris Moore]

PS. a storage pool can be logically segmented into datasets that you can share with different permissions.

 

[Johnpants]

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah I'm an ancient windows and raid user so the terminology will probably be mixed up til I get used to it.

You've thrown me with the 3 vdevs.. Did you mean 2 and then a 3rd when I add extra drives later? Do you mirror 2 drives inside a vdev then, rather than stripe the disks then mirror 2 pools? Kind of makes sense now what you are saying. I am aiming for a similar setup to a raid 10. Also, when it comes to upgrading to a larger disk or replacing a faulty one would it be a simple swap and then it replicates from the mirrored one or would I need to configure it all manually?

And is it viable to run the os straight from a usb?

Thanks again,

John.

 

[danb35]

The two 3TB drives can be a mirror vdev, then you can have two more mirror vdevs using the 1TB drives. This will give you three mirror vdevs in a single storage pool.

I'm pretty sure you meant that the two 1 TB disks would form a second mirrored vdev, for a total of two mirror vdevs.

Also, when it comes to upgrading to a larger disk or replacing a faulty one would it be a simple swap and then it replicates from the mirrored one

You'd need to tell FreeNAS to replace the disk; the rest of the process is automated.

And is it viable to run the os straight from a usb?

A small SSD (or even spinner) would be much better.

 

[Johnpants]

Thank you Dan, that kind of confirms what i though.

I have a disk in there at the minute that is working fine but it's taking up a SATA connection that I could use for storage is why I was thinking USB drive...

Awesome, I love how simple FreeNAS is, it's just mainly the terminology and capabilities that I need to get used to.

So going to go for the following:

Pool 1-
Vdev 1 mirrored 1TB + 1TB (Potential to upgrade to larger disks in the future)
Vdev 2 mirrored 3TB + 3TB
Vdev 3 Future Mirrored NTB + NTB

This would give me 4TB of accessible storage with redundancy if any single disk in any Vdev died. Would just be a case of telling FreeNAS i'm replacing the disk, swapping it out and let it do it's thing?

Now in the storage area in FreeNAS would these all come under one Vol? Just out of curiosity (again lack of terminology knowledge).

Thanks again,

John.

 

[danb35]

Would just be a case of telling FreeNAS i'm replacing the disk, swapping it out and let it do it's thing?

Pretty much. See https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/11.2/storage.html#replacing-a-failed-disk

Now in the storage area in FreeNAS would these all come under one Vol?

As of 11.2, it shows as one "pool" (which has always been the correct term, but versions prior to 11.2 incorrectly called them "volumes").

 

[Chris Moore]

I'm pretty sure you meant that the two 1 TB disks would form a second mirrored vdev, for a total of two mirror vdevs.

I must have misunderstood. I thought there were four 1TB drives. I was reading it on my phone.

 

[Chris Moore]

Now in the storage area in FreeNAS would these all come under one Vol? Just out of curiosity (again lack of terminology knowledge).

This is some documentation that you should take time to review to help you get more familiar with FreeNAS:

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/

 

[Johnpants]

Thank you for the advice everyone.

I got cracking last night and had a bit of a test run. All seemed to go smoothly and everything was working. 2 USB drives being delivered today which i'll configure tomorrow.

Do have a couple of technical questions though, is there any way to see both sides of the mirror? Obviously after setup it shows as the available size, but is there any way to physically see that everything has been mirrored correctly? And when accessing data from that vdev, does it pull from both sides of the mirror? Doesn't really help in any way, more technical curiosity.

Thanks,

John.

 

[danb35]

but is there any way to physically see that everything has been mirrored correctly?

If the pool is healthy, everything's been mirrored correctly. If not, the system will warn you.

And when accessing data from that vdev, does it pull from both sides of the mirror?

Yes.

 

[Johnpants]

Great, thanks Dan.

Spent a couple of hours last night trying to get FreeNAS installed on a USB stick. Try after try and it just kept coming back with fails. Eventually I reformatted the drive using the Rufus tool mentioned in one of the online docs, rather than just using the standard windows formatting tool and it worked. I can't remember the exact configuration I used unfortunately as it was 3am by that time and I was struggling to stay awake, haha.

I did have an issue when I rebooted where it just sat on a black screen but I didn't have time to look properly as had to get to work. Suspect it might just be selecting the wrong drive to boot from in BIOS or something. Will check later tonight.

Thanks,

John.

 

[danb35]

I've been seeing a lot of reports of problems getting a boot USB of 11.2 working. If you aren't able to get that working, another way to go about it would be to install 11.1-Uwhatever, then use the GUI to upgrade to 11.2-U1.

 

[Johnpants]

I've been seeing a lot of reports of problems getting a boot USB of 11.2 working. If you aren't able to get that working, another way to go about it would be to install 11.1-Uwhatever, then use the GUI to upgrade to 11.2-U1.

Hmm, thanks. I still have the original 9.something iso I used when I first set it up so if I can't get it running after a couple of tries I will probably go from that one and upgrade like you say.

John.

 

[Johnpants]

All up and running. Went with the version 9 I had and it worked first time. Upgraded it and took a little getting used to the new UI as I never had that before and a couple of issues with folder permissions but sorted that out. New disks are on the way so now it's just a case of repopulating it all again once they arrive.

Thank you again for your help and advice, much appreciated!

John.