I need a NAS expert's opinions please.

[therobmyers]

As the title says. I am looking for some of you experts when it comes to setting up a NAS server. Recently I came across a good deal for the Lenovo TS140 so decided to pull the trigger.

Here is what I have:

Lenovo TS140
2 x 4TB WD Red hard drives
16GB thumb drive for the OS
4 GB Crucial ram to up it to 8GB

I have another 4 GB external HD (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...e=samsung_4TB_External-_-22-152-420-_-Product)


My question is this. I have literally 2,000 movies (About 4.8 TB worth right now, growing weekly) Is there a way to install my hard drives so that I get the full 8TB worth? I know if you do like RAID 5 or whatever it literally halves your storage in half. If I have to cut my storage in half, would I be alright to take the 4 TB HD out of the enclosure to make it 3 x 4 TB hard drives giving me a total 12TB? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I have everything sitting here in boxes waiting to get educated on the matter.

 

[Bidule0hm]

You can do this, it's called stripping (or RAID0). But by doing this if any of the drives fail you lose the entire pool...

 

[SweetAndLow]

Here is some guidance

1. It's suggested to use raidz2
2. It's suggested to not fill pool past 80%
3. You shouldn't use raid because zfs handles the parity for you.
4. You need to read cyberjocks noon guide.

Now to answer your questions. Raid5 doesn't halve your storage it just uses one disk for parity. You could strip your drives and get 100% of all disk space for your data but you would have zero redundancy. If you used your 3 drives in raidz1 you would get 8tb of storage but should only use 6.4tb because going past 80% full has drawbacks.

 

[therobmyers]

Would using the drive that's in the Samsung with my 2 WD Red drives hurt the performance at all?

 

[gpsguy]

Where is the data now? On the 2x4TB drives, possibly formatted as NTFS?

If so, consider buying 2 - 6TB drives, creating a mirror and copying the existing data to it. Then create another mirror using the 4TB drives and stripe them into the pool. Use the 4TB Samsung to backup any critical data and keep it separate.

 

[jgreco]

Generally speaking, the question you should be asking yourself is "what do I do when a disk inevitably fails." Are you going to be really pissed off when a disk fails and you lose half your movies?

ZFS is all about protecting your data through redundancy. If you don't provide it with at least a little redundancy, you will lose data the moment anything bad happens to one of your drives.

Ideally you want a minimum of RAIDZ2 to protect against failures.

 

[Apollo]

First and last time I got a good deal from Lenovo was when they pulled that door crasher advertisement online. They claimed they couldn't honor the order as the price was wrong, next thing they hiked the priced and canceled my order. Since then Lenovo is on my to never buy list.
Do you actually have the system with you?