Looking for config advice

[johnnykilo]

Got my FreeNAS up and running now I need a little advice on configuration. I have 6 total drives (2) 2 TB, (1) 1 TB, (1) 750GB, (1) 640GB and (1) 500GB. Its running a 64bit AMD Phenom 9500 quad core CPU with 8 GB RAM with a GB LAN connection.

My main function will be as a media server for XMBC so there will be mostly read actions on it over the local network. I also have 2 laptops (1 Win 7 and 1 Win 8) that I would like to back up on there as well. I have about 1.75 TB of media to move on it. I would like to have redundancy with the array.

Advice?

 

[survive]

Hi Johnnykilo,

The single best thing I can tell you right now is read this:

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/slideshow-explaining-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

once you have gone thoroughly through that presentation if you have more questions then feel free to ask away.

-Will

 

[johnnykilo]

Will

Thanks for the link, this helped answer a lot of questions but I some things are 100% clear for me. I have a solid grasp conceptually but I need a little help within the web interface. (Sorry if I missed a guide for that)

Is a VDev essentially the same as setting up a ZFS volume?

I am consdiering a RAIDZ2 for my 6 drives. I might be confusing redundancy with backing up, but would a RAIDZ2 be redundant method of data "backup"? Using SMART monitoring, scrubs and nightly email notifications of course.

If not, and I set up 2 VDevsin my zpool how do I get them to replicate? I see that in a RAID array the data is written to 2 disk simultaneously, is this function built into the FreeNAS OS/ZFS? Or is it something that need to be set up? If I do have get the backup and one VDev fails does the other take over automatically?