How to arrange this bunch of disks?

[zamana]

Hi!

I'm about to redefine my humble NAS/Media/Fileserver and would like to get suggestions regarding how to arrange/split this bunch of disks (all of them inside the same system/case):

SEAGATE SATA 3.5:
8 x 4TB
2 x 2TB
1 x 1TB

1 x 32GB 2.5 SSD

Excluding the obvious choice of the SSD to the OS, how do you arrange the others for data?

Thanks!

 

[BigDave]

Hi!

I'm about to redefine my humble NAS/Media/Fileserver and would like to get suggestions regarding how to arrange/split this bunch of disks (all of them inside the same system/case):

SEAGATE SATA 3.5:
8 x 4TB
2 x 2TB
1 x 1TB

1 x 32GB 2.5 SSD

Excluding the obvious choice of the SSD to the OS, how do you arrange the others for data?

Thanks!

It's not a good practice to form Vdevs with mixed drives of different capacities, so I would suggest
you take the 8 x 4TB drives and make a RAIDz2 volume/pool out of those.

You should not add any of your remaining drives to that (8 x 4) volume/pool!

You could take the 2 x 2TB drives and make a separate volume/pool in a mirrored configuration
if you need more storage.

I would not recommend the use of the 1TB drive.

 

[zamana]

Hi!

Thanks for reply.

That's seems a good arrange.

By the way...

(...)
I would not recommend the use of the 1TB drive.

Not even as a standalone, temporary, ephemeral place to "copy and delete" files? Can you explain why?

Thanks.
Regards.

 

[BigDave]

Not even as a standalone, temporary, ephemeral place to "copy and delete" files? Can you explain why?

FreeNAS is all about redundancy. A single drive volume would not provide that, leaving your data
contained on that drive vulnerable to permanent and unrecoverable loss.

 

[zamana]

Got it!

Thanks.

 

[BigDave]

Got it!

Thanks.

Make sure that once you configure your volumes/pools, that you set up SMART
testing for your all the drives. There are several posts that you can read that explain
how to set up SMART testing, it's a very important part of protecting your data.