Is this a good starting pool?

[SebastianNorth]

Hi,

Newbie here, first time using TrueNAS, ZFS and my new TRUENAS-MINI-3.0-X+ running TrueNAS-SCALE-23.10.1.1.

I intend to use if to back up Windows desktops, for Windows file shares, backing up Linux systems and running some VMs.

So I was wondering if this is a good starting pool?

My concern is that during the pool creation I did not assigned any space to the Metadata VDEVs, Log VDEVs, Cache VDEVs, Spare VDEVs and Dedup VDEVs.

Do I need to make my Data VDEVs smaller and leave some space for the other VDEVs?

Or I take space from the Data VDEVs for the other VDEVs.

Thank you very much for your guidance.

 

[chuck32]

Every vdev is a separate, physical device. Apart from probably being able to solve this by partitioning you cannot use your current data drives.
Good news is, you don't need to for you use case. You can read about the optional vdevs here.

The only thing you _could_ consider, is adding a separate harddrive as a spare. But honestly, if it's just a backup machine and not the single copy of your data (which it shouldn't be anyway) I wouldn't. I don't have a spare drive for my secondary NAS either.

 

[ChrisRJ]

Every vdev is a separate, physical device.

No. As a usually strongly discouraged edge-case it is possible to create a VDEV with a single drive. But in 99+% a VDEV will consist of at least 2 drives. For more I recommend to read on ZFS basics (see recommended readings in my signature). Without this understanding the TrueNAS experience will suffer a lot.

Apart from probably being able to solve this by partitioning you cannot use your current data drives.

Partitioning is not supported and I would personally never use it (despite 15+ years using ZFS)

Good news is, you don't need to for you use case. You can read about the optional vdevs here.

Agreed

The only thing you _could_ consider, is adding a separate harddrive as a spare. But honestly, if it's just a backup machine and not the single copy of your data (which it shouldn't be anyway) I wouldn't. I don't have a spare drive for my secondary NAS either.

Spares are typically used when the NAS is not located on-site but remote.

What I would recommend is to have a spare drive lying around and burn it in before.

If I interpret the screenshot correctly you are running a 2-way mirror. Depending on your level of paranoia adding a 3rd drive to the mirror might be an option. With that your data would survive the simultaneous loss of 2 drives.

 

[chuck32]

No. As a usually strongly discouraged edge-case it is possible to create a VDEV with a single drive.

Agreed, poor wording on my side. What I meant to say was: at least physical separate devices and not partitions. Just wanted to point out the technical possibility. But you are right, a vdev typically consists of more than 1 hard drive.