BeGaDaButcher
Cadet
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2021
- Messages
- 2
Hello all,
I am quite new to ZFS, but have been loving it so far! Apologies for the wordy post, I will try bold the TL:DR's but wanted to add the full context as well.
I have two systems, a Proxmox VM host with a 6x3TB RAIDz2 backup array and a Frankenstein monster of a NAS running old PC hardware with a bunch of different size hard drives all in the same vdev in a striped pool for mass storage.
I am looking at resetting up my NAS and was wondering if there is a better way that I should be setting it up.
The NAS's purpose is to store copies of my families movie rips of our physical copies that we digitize. We have a Android smart TV that will be running Kodi and will be pointing to the NAS in order to watch the content. Updating/adding new files would be via a windows machine or adding a USB storage device to the NAS to copy too but dont think TrueNAS has a file manager so not sure if this is possible? I am comfortable with SAMBA but as the TV is Android, it would be great to try NFS to be more native.
Anyhow, the main question I would like to ask is what configuration should I set up for my random mix of hard drives of different sizes for mass storage.
What I am trying to achieve:
I had a very tight budget for this project, so I basically just gobbled up external hard drives when they where around $25/TB then shucked them, hence the strange size ranges.
For a while I have been running all 4x HDD's in one vdev and pool in a striped array (ticking the force changes button when the warning saying the disks cant be of different sizes popped up).
Originally when I ordered the 4TB, the plan was to rearrange the pool to have two vdev's of 18TB each then stripe them together (ie the 10TB+8TB Striped with the 14TB+4TB) for a more optimal array - but I think I have got myself confused as I believe vdev's need to have hdd's of the same capacity is that right?
Also, as I have two spare SATA ports on the motherboard, I was wondering if I should add a SATA SSD for a dedicated ZIL device, and the NVMe drive for SLOG with the NAS OS running off of the last SATA SSD port?
If you have made it this far, thank you for reading and thank you in advance for any help/feedback!
I am quite new to ZFS, but have been loving it so far! Apologies for the wordy post, I will try bold the TL:DR's but wanted to add the full context as well.
I have two systems, a Proxmox VM host with a 6x3TB RAIDz2 backup array and a Frankenstein monster of a NAS running old PC hardware with a bunch of different size hard drives all in the same vdev in a striped pool for mass storage.
I am looking at resetting up my NAS and was wondering if there is a better way that I should be setting it up.
The NAS's purpose is to store copies of my families movie rips of our physical copies that we digitize. We have a Android smart TV that will be running Kodi and will be pointing to the NAS in order to watch the content. Updating/adding new files would be via a windows machine or adding a USB storage device to the NAS to copy too but dont think TrueNAS has a file manager so not sure if this is possible? I am comfortable with SAMBA but as the TV is Android, it would be great to try NFS to be more native.
Anyhow, the main question I would like to ask is what configuration should I set up for my random mix of hard drives of different sizes for mass storage.
What I am trying to achieve:
- Mass storage - at least 30TB usable space as this is close to where our library is at
- Will be writing moderate to large (4GB-30GB) files to the NAS, so any write performance would be great, but most likley will be capped by the 1GBPS ethernet port (There are 2x1GBPS ethernet ports, so wondering if I can bridge the connections in TrueNAS as well but that is for later...)
- Read speeds need to be at respectable streaming speeds over the network. 4k movies are in the minority, most are 1080p.
- redundancy is not needed at all - the NAS will be purely copies of files on other systems with redundancy (ether on my backup array or hosted on 2x QNAP NAS's at my folks place). Last time I set up the NAS it took a day or two to copy over the collection. So if I lose the array i will simply rebuild it and copy back from the other sources.
- HDDs: 1x14TB, 1x10TB, 1x8TB and new 1x4TB (replacing a 2TB top up HDD when I found out that 32TB is under 30TB usable)
- 2x SATA SSD's spare
- 1xPICe to M.2. NVME expansion card with ether a budget 120GB NVMe SSD or a budget 500GB NVMe SSD
- 6x SATA ports on the motherboard
I had a very tight budget for this project, so I basically just gobbled up external hard drives when they where around $25/TB then shucked them, hence the strange size ranges.
For a while I have been running all 4x HDD's in one vdev and pool in a striped array (ticking the force changes button when the warning saying the disks cant be of different sizes popped up).
Originally when I ordered the 4TB, the plan was to rearrange the pool to have two vdev's of 18TB each then stripe them together (ie the 10TB+8TB Striped with the 14TB+4TB) for a more optimal array - but I think I have got myself confused as I believe vdev's need to have hdd's of the same capacity is that right?
Also, as I have two spare SATA ports on the motherboard, I was wondering if I should add a SATA SSD for a dedicated ZIL device, and the NVMe drive for SLOG with the NAS OS running off of the last SATA SSD port?
If you have made it this far, thank you for reading and thank you in advance for any help/feedback!
