Hi,
I'm new to FreeNAS and have had a tiny amount of experience with ESXi, after Christmas I'm going to build a white box ESXi server and (amongst other things) install FreeNAS on it. I'd like some suggestions on my hardware choices and upgrade strategy please.
In my desktop I currently have 4x1.5TB drives in a RAID 5 array and 2x1TB in a mirror. I've also bought a Antec 1200 case. This is my rough specification but I am completely open to suggestions and I don't want to buy myself in to a corner and find that my system has issues with ESXi/ZFS.
I'm going to create a RAIDZ2 VDEV with the 3TB WD REDs, what might happen is I run out of money and decide to only buy three hard drives and then buy the fourth a month or two later. If this happens then what I was thinking of doing is creating the RAIDZ2 in a degraded state (with only one parity drive) and then adding the fourth afterwards. Is this possible/advisable? What disadvantages does this hold over RAIDZ1? (I assume that there must be some or everyone would do it.)
After I fill this pool then I would like to add some more WD RED 3TB drives, I'm not sure if this is possible but what I was hoping to do is:
Any advice would be great.
Thanks,
Joe
I'm new to FreeNAS and have had a tiny amount of experience with ESXi, after Christmas I'm going to build a white box ESXi server and (amongst other things) install FreeNAS on it. I'd like some suggestions on my hardware choices and upgrade strategy please.
In my desktop I currently have 4x1.5TB drives in a RAID 5 array and 2x1TB in a mirror. I've also bought a Antec 1200 case. This is my rough specification but I am completely open to suggestions and I don't want to buy myself in to a corner and find that my system has issues with ESXi/ZFS.
- AM3+ motherboard that supports 32GB ECC RAM, something like an
Asus M5A97 R2. EDIT: M5A99X EVO R2 has confirmed support for IOMMU. - Piledriver based 8 core CPU - FX 8320 or 8350
- Kingston Value RAM - 2x8GB ECC, I'll buy another 16GB when RAM prices become a bit more sensible.
- ~500W 80+ PSU
- M1015 SATA controller in IT mode
- 4x WD Red 3TB
- 256GB SSD - to run VMs off
I'm going to create a RAIDZ2 VDEV with the 3TB WD REDs, what might happen is I run out of money and decide to only buy three hard drives and then buy the fourth a month or two later. If this happens then what I was thinking of doing is creating the RAIDZ2 in a degraded state (with only one parity drive) and then adding the fourth afterwards. Is this possible/advisable? What disadvantages does this hold over RAIDZ1? (I assume that there must be some or everyone would do it.)
After I fill this pool then I would like to add some more WD RED 3TB drives, I'm not sure if this is possible but what I was hoping to do is:
- Buy four more 3TB drives.
- Add one parity drive from the existing VDEV.
- Add two 3TB virtual hard drives in ESXi (using the 4x1.5TB drives mentioned earlier.)
- Create an 8 drive RAIDZ2 VDEV (With one drive missing)
- Transfer the data across.
- Add the missing 8th physical drive.
- Use dd to image the two virtual drives on to the two remaining physical ones.
Any advice would be great.
Thanks,
Joe