is SSHD worth, size of HD, about ZFS, and ...

[ihwBunny]

Will freeNAS get benefit from these SSHD drive? The most of them I can find are for desktop, not for NAS, is it a huge concerns for home use?

I am building my first freeNAS box, according to my reading from some of the posts
MB: X10SL7-F (will do the it-mod on the built-in SAS2308)
RAM: 16GB
Case: Full ATX with 8x3.5" and 3x5.25"
CPU: Xeon E3-1231V3

I'm old IT tech but new to freeNAS. my feeling is HGST HDs have good reputations than others, but not sure if it DeskStart model is good for NAS. model H3IKNAS40003272SN, has 3-year warranty, home page: http://www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/nas-desktop-drive-kit

Is 4TB a good choice or stick with 3GB with more disks?

Is it easy to change from RAIDZ1 to RAIDZ2 later by adding more HDs, or totally has to be rebuilt?

Too many questions in one thread.

 

[danb35]

Is it easy to change from RAIDZ1 to RAIDZ2 later by adding more HDs

No, it's not possible to do this. You'd need to rebuild the array. See @cyberjock's powerpoint on ZFS basics, or Dru's primer on the same.

As to disk size, up to you. Figure out your storage needs and go from there. When you're looking at $/GB, though, consider the cost of the whole system. If I were building, and I could afford it, I'd probably go for the 4 TB disks. Western Digital Reds are probably the most popular drives around here. There isn't really any problem with using desktop drives rather than "NAS" drives, except that some (specifically, WD Greens) park the heads way too aggressively to be suitable. Those can be reconfigured to be more suitable.

Your hardware choices look fine, though the Xeon CPU may well be overkill for your needs--but since you haven't described your needs, I can't be sure. It definitely won't hurt.

There's a bit of a price premium for SSHD disks, as I recall. I don't think I'd pay it.

 

[ihwBunny]

The reason for a overkill hardware is that it should be better for a long run, that is what I have learned from my experiences, giving your hardware more power now for less headache later, it's just personal. For now, I really don't have to much for saving, have 2TB internal used 1TB, three 2TB USB external, one for game console, one for movies, they almost full, one for my backup attached to AC1900 wireless router with Tomato Shibby's firmware, and then I was wondering why not get NAS replacing the USB drive, learned from the Internet, was stuggling with a brand NAS like QNAP/Synology, then find freeNAS is for me, most probably, and maybe later go with pfSense as key network device for home as gateway/firewall/DHCP/DNS and etc.

forgot to mention, this HGST DeskStar model is specific for NAS, it says "NAS Desktop Drive Kits" on its homepage. If anyone may had experience with it.

Now the SSHD price is getting closer to regular HD, my feeling:
WD WD40E31X Blue SSHD 4TB 5400RPM SATA is CAD220 (http://www.ncix.com/detail/western-digital-wd40e31x-blue-sshd-06-110115-1049.htm);
Seagate ST4000DX001 SSHD 4TB 3.5in SATA3 64MB Cache Internal Solid State Hybrid Drive OEM is CAD180 (http://www.ncix.com/detail/seagate-st4000dx001-sshd-4tb-3-5in-64-91259-1378.htm)

 

[joeschmuck]

Do not purchase SSHD's for a NAS. These are not what you think and they do not operate how you would expect, unless you do know how they operate and then you wouldn't use them in a NAS. The system you are building is not "high speed" or "high availability" so I wouldn't waste the extra money on something that could cause you more problems than you know. If you want to do some overkill, you missed out in the RAM area, 16GB is just a starting point, to obtain better performance should you actually push your NAS, more RAM would boost performance than any other upgrade. The next upgrade would be low latency hard drives to speed up the access time to data.

 

[danb35]

Nothing wrong with overkill, I just didn't want you to think you needed a Xeon for simple data storage.

On the HGST drives, I think we have some people here using them with good results. I'm just gunshy ever since the whole "death star" thing (although I do have one of them in my server, with 27,571 power-on hours). I really don't have any experience with the SSHDs in a FreeNAS box to address that.

 

[ihwBunny]

Nothing wrong with overkill, I just didn't want you to think you needed a Xeon for simple data storage.

On the HGST drives, I think we have some people here using them with good results. I'm just gunshy ever since the whole "death star" thing (although I do have one of them in my server, with 27,571 power-on hours). I really don't have any experience with the SSHDs in a FreeNAS box to address that.

Forgot to put my thanks word on the screen, have thanked you in my heart once read your post.
yes, the deskstar makes me hesitate. anyway, maybe get two HGST and two WD red is a not a bad choice?

 

[ihwBunny]

Do not purchase SSHD's for a NAS. These are not what you think and they do not operate how you would expect, unless you do know how they operate and then you wouldn't use them in a NAS. The system you are building is not "high speed" or "high availability" so I wouldn't waste the extra money on something that could cause you more problems than you know. If you want to do some overkill, you missed out in the RAM area, 16GB is just a starting point, to obtain better performance should you actually push your NAS, more RAM would boost performance than any other upgrade. The next upgrade would be low latency hard drives to speed up the access time to data.

Great, I probably will not go with SSHDs, thanks,

For now, just want to use this NAS to do as simple as a central storage for my family. have seen there are plugins to let it do a lot of other tasks and eat memories as well, but haven't take closer look at it yet.

I have got the idea that ZFS put caches in RAM, so it needs a lot of memory to perform right. So I'm going to add it to 32GB, as I am planning run it as VM and reading the DO and DOn't posts.

low latency HDs? if you mean the 10K rpm or enterprise drives, maybe not now, toooo expensive for my home.

BTW, is there a quick answer to compare 4x4TB with 5x3TB, how many useable spaces I can get from them.

 

[danb35]

BTW, is there a quick answer to compare 4x4TB with 5x3TB, how many useable spaces I can get from them.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/zfs-raid-size-and-reliability-calculator.28191/

Short answer: In RAIDZ1 (which wouldn't be recommended for > 1 TB drives), 4 x 4 TB would yield about 12 TB, or 10.8 TiB. 5 x 3 TB would yield the same.

In RAIDZ2, 4 x 4 TB would yield about 8 TB, or 7.2 TiB. 5 x 3 TB would give you 9 TB, or 8.1 TiB. All of these numbers would be reduced by filesystem overhead, reserved space, etc, and the calculator would probably give a more accurate answer.

 

[Bidule0hm]

BTW, is there a quick answer to compare 4x4TB with 5x3TB, how many useable spaces I can get from them.

You can use the calculator I made, the link is in my signature ;)

Edit: ah, @danb35 beat me...

 

[joeschmuck]

BTW, is there a quick answer to compare 4x4TB with 5x3TB, how many useable spaces I can get from them.

Yup, look at my tag line.

Edit: Guess I'm not fast enough, have to move the truck so the daughter could get her car out of the driveway.

 

[joeschmuck]

So I'm going to add it to 32GB, as I am planning run it as VM

Run at your own risk. If it were me, I'd run 64GB RAM if I could support it if I were running on a VM host. I say that because I'm certain I'd use it for much more than just a NAS VM, otherwise why run it on a VM in the first place and I like running VMs.

 

[ihwBunny]

Run at your own risk. If it were me, I'd run 64GB RAM if I could support it if I were running on a VM host. I say that because I'm certain I'd use it for much more than just a NAS VM, otherwise why run it on a VM in the first place and I like running VMs.

too bad, MB supports up to 32GB only......

 

[ihwBunny]

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/zfs-raid-size-and-reliability-calculator.28191/

Short answer: In RAIDZ1 (which wouldn't be recommended for > 1 TB drives), 4 x 4 TB would yield about 12 TB, or 10.8 TiB. 5 x 3 TB would yield the same.

In RAIDZ2, 4 x 4 TB would yield about 8 TB, or 7.2 TiB. 5 x 3 TB would give you 9 TB, or 8.1 TiB. All of these numbers would be reduced by filesystem overhead, reserved space, etc, and the calculator would probably give a more accurate answer.

more home works for tonight. 9TB > 8TB, em...

 

[ihwBunny]

You can use the calculator I made, the link is in my signature ;)

Edit: ah, @danb35 beat me...

Great! lot info in your signature to study,

 

[ihwBunny]

One more question about RAIDZ2
If put 5x3TB for now to get around 8TB spaces, and add 1x3TB later, it should pick it up automatically and make it as 6x3TB.
it shouldn't be as hard as from convert 1 -> 2. Am I right?

 

[Bidule0hm]

If put 5x3TB for now to get around 8TB spaces, and add 1x3TB later, it should pick it up automatically and make it as 6x3TB.

No, it doesn't work like that. Please read Cyberjock's ZFS Guide (link is in my signature) ;)

NB: RAID-Z1 isn't recommended with drives this big (link is again in my signature).

 

[solarisguy]

Whatever you have (in total) should be, in my opinion, at most 25-30% of usable storage you are to deploy.

For example, with six 4TB drives you are getting only around 12 TiB usable... Do you have more than 3TiB in total? I think yes. I would then consider either 8 drives 4TB each or 6 drives 6TB each.

The above assumes RAID-Z2. The difference between TB and TiB is difficult to get accustomed to, but one has to.

I just posted today elsewhere in the forum, that there are downsides to mixing drive types...

 

[danb35]

more home works for tonight. 9TB > 8TB, em...

1 TB (terabyte) = 10^12 bytes, or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. These are the "TB" that hard drive manufacturers use when marketing their products. 1 TiB (tebibyte) = 2 ^ 40 bytes, or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. These are what most operating systems report as "TB", or in the case of FreeNAS, "TiB". 1 TB ~= 0.9 TiB.

 

[ihwBunny]

No, it doesn't work like that. Please read Cyberjock's ZFS Guide (link is in my signature) ;)

NB: RAID-Z1 isn't recommended with drives this big (link is again in my signature).

Sure will read. and you have some useful scripts listed, I do scripts on both OS X & Windows and open source, freeNAS is based on BSD, hopefully it's not to hard for me to understand it and when I get familiar with it, and would love to share my time to this community.

 

[ihwBunny]

1 TB (terabyte) = 10^12 bytes, or 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. These are the "TB" that hard drive manufacturers use when marketing their products. 1 TiB (tebibyte) = 2 ^ 40 bytes, or 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. These are what most operating systems report as "TB", or in the case of FreeNAS, "TiB". 1 TB ~= 0.9 TiB.

Thanks for clarifying the TiB and TB, it's good for all who don't know the difference.

What I was saying is 4x4TB yields 8TB and same price 5x3TB yields extra 1TB spaces. so probably, I may go with 5x3TB for same money but more outcomes.