Initial setup of drives. Sorry for the length

[TapRackPull]

I realize there will be as many opinions as there are options, however, I am new to servers, and setting them up. Currently, I have a desktop with a 1TB drive that is out of space. It has been shared over my network for music and movie streaming. I intend to use this desktop and convert it permanently into my server. For that purpose I have 3x2TB drives ready to go to set up a raid array of some kind. What type of array should I choose is the basic question of this post. UFS vs ZFS. Hardware vs Software. All opinions are welcome, but let's keep things civilized please.


Here are my requirements (in some order of importance)
Expandability. - I have no interest in having a system that is a PITA to expand. I prefer the idea of just slide in a new drive assign it to an array and walk away.
Read Speed. - Since much of this will be for streaming Blu-Ray over the network, read speed is critical for me. I suspect all raid versions will meet this criteria
Unmanaged. - I do not want to spend hours a week tweaking the settings to maintain performance.
Failure Tolerance. - There will be nothing on this system that can not be replaced. That said, I would prefer for it to be able to rebuild itself in the event of drive failure. Raid 0 is not an option... But, by the same token I have no need for mirrored sets. The server does not need to be up 24/7/365 if a problem crops up, I will take it down until I can replace the drive.
Maximize Available Space. - Pretty much self explanitory.

The only other thing I need to understand is how to get the data from the 1TB to the newly built array. Bear in mind that it is currently built into the system that will become my NAS. Is there an option to transfer this data inside FreeNAS that I am missing? OR do I need to attach the drive to my laptop and copy the data through the network? !!! GOD I HOPE NOT!!!!

Thank you in advance for all your feedback.

 

[TapRackPull]

In case it is of any help, here are my system specs.

CASE: Antec 900
MOBO: ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe
CPU: AMD Phenom 9600 2.6GHz
MEMORY: 4GB Non-ECC DDR2-800
HDD#1: WD Caviar Blue 250GB (Current Boot Drive)
HDD#2: WD Caviar Black 1TB (Current Media Drive)
HDDs#3: 3x2TB WD Green EARS
PSU: 500Watt (either Antec or Corsair - I don't recall at the moment)

Thanks again.

 

[ProtoSD]

Well a few basic things that I think most of will agree on is ZFS, NO hardware raid. Unmanaged shouldn't be a problem, and expandability is a little on the tricky side. FreeNAS isn't like a drobo where you can mix and match drives, you definitely need to plan stuff, but once you understand things there are ways to expand, just not the way you are probably thinking.

If you go with ZFS raidZ1, you can loose 1 disk and still function, this will also give you the maximum space for the disks you have.
If you go with ZFS raidZ2, you can loose 2 disks and still function, but you loose the extra space for parity.

So from what you said, ZFS raidZ1 is probably what you're looking for, but once you build a ZFS pool, you can't just add a disk to that pool and bump up your storage. You could just throw in another disk, but it wouldn't be part of the ZFS pool, and you wouldn't have any redundancy. You'd have to create another pool of disks. You can replace each disk in your pool one at a time with a larger disk and after they 'resilver', you can expand the pool, but that means replacing all of your disks before you can expand.

FreeNAS will let you mount NTFS, Ext2, and UFS partitioned disks, so if the data that you want to transfer is on that type of filesystem then you can transfer them internally. You'll have to mount them and transfer from the command line, so if you're not familiar with Unix/FreeBSD there is a learning curve there.

Hope that helps some, other opinions will follow shortly ;-)