Just bought a bundle of stuff for my first FreeNAS build, please tell me if I did well .

[deadman36g]

Here are my parts
Silverstone DS380B
Silverstone ST45SF-G
ASRock C2750D4I Mini ITX
Kingston 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1333
4x WD Red WD40EFRX 4TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" NAS Internal Hard Drive
2x SanDisk Ultra Fit™ CZ43 16GB USB 3.0 Low-Profile Flash Drive

Please tell me if I left something out as I want to do this correctly.

 

[DifferentStrokes]

Grab one more flash drive so you can do mirrored boot drives. It's real cheap insureance.

 

[deadman36g]

Sure thing, DifferentStro, thank you for the advice.

 

[DifferentStrokes]

How are you planning on setting up the hard drives? RAIDZ2?

 

[DifferentStrokes]

Oh.....and welcome aboard.

 

[deadman36g]

Not really sure yet on RAIDZ2 or not. I am a new user coming from a Western Digital My Book Live Duo (Which for the most part has served me well.) My DUO has 2 2TB drives that I do clone to each other in case one drives decides to call it a day. Is RAIDZ2 your recommedation? I have a HTPC I use for Plex and other Streaming options so for starters I only will be using my new machine for file storage (I just recently filled my DUO) and possibly torrenting. I see no need for Plex/SabNZB/etc. right now.

P.S. For the last reply, Thanks :)

 

[deadman36g]

After some reading, I think RAIDZ2 is my best choice. I wasn’t sure between it and Raid 10, but I think I have made up my mind. With 4x4TB drives using RAIDZ2, I would have 8TB usable if I am correct?

 

[Bidule0hm]

I recommend RAID-Z2 too ;)

You'll have 8 TB (7.3 TiB) of data space but after the overheads and the recommended free space (80% rule) you'll have 6.3 TB (5.7 TiB) usable.

 

[mav@]

Just a little personal "know how": Torrents mentioned here tend to download files in random order, creating significant data fragmentation. I've noticed it significantly reduce later read speed for downloaded files. For RAIDZ2 this limitation may be even worse due to lower read IOPS, comparing to my RAID10. For other file systems transmission can preallocate space for downloaded files, but ZFS that does not work. So on my server I created separate small scratch pool of single SSD, configured as transmission's temporary space. After the file download is complete, transmission sequentially copies it to the main storage with minimal fragmentation and maximal speed. It is not cheap, but working nicely. I have other uses for that SSD pool too, so its not a waste even if torrent is idle.

 

[deadman36g]

The MyBook Live Duo I mentioned earlier is setup for Raid1 and it has served me well for going on 3 years. Would Raid1 (or Raid10?) but perhaps a better option for me to use? Besides the torrenting, my freenas will be almost exclusively used for media (Video, Music, and Pictures).

 

[HoneyBadger]

"RAID10" or in ZFS-speak, "multiple mirrored vdevs" would definitely improve the random write performance, but at the cost of the wrong pair of disks failing being able to take out your entire storage.

RAIDZ2 is analogous to RAID6 in that it can survive the failure of any two disks - mirrored vdevs, you have to make sure you don't lose both disks in a single vdev. So there are situations where two disks might die and take out your entire pool.