Media Server / Storage question

[spencerisadog]

Hello all, I'm new to the forums but not completely new to FreeNAS. I wanted to get rid of cable and wanted to use Emby, Sonarr, and SABnzbd and I found that FreeNAS had all of those as plugins. I bought an old crappy, not recommended PowerEdge 2900 off of craigslist just to see if I could get it all working, and I did! So, I've bought a bit newer hardware (Dell R715) and it had two drives in it. I don't really have a problem with losing data (right now), ripping all of our dvds is kind of a bummer, but I know how to set up a share and pull those off separately. The server I bought had 2x 1TB drives in it, however one of them proved to be bad. I was eager to get everything installed and running so I've set all my jails up, flashed the H200 to the LSI for IT mode and set up one volume of one of the 1TB disks. I read CyberJock's FreeNAS Guide 9.2.1 and it helped a lot, but I still had a few questions:

1) If I should purchase more drives, how do I backup my jails so that I don't have to configure all of the plugins again? Is it as simple as taking a snapshot?

2) If I do buy another drive, I (think I) understand that I can't just drop it in and make it a mirror because you can't expand a vdev. However, as I said before, I can pull our movies off and just delete the volume and make a new volume of 2 x 1TB that is mirrored, so I would be able to lose one drive and just replace it, correct?

Sidenote: Question 2 is more for "down the road" if I should decide to put our iMac backups via TimeMachine to the FreeNAS, I'd hate to lose all the pictures and videos of our kids.

TL;DR - If I have 4 x 2TB disks, I can have two disks mirrored for media stuff (media vdev), and the other two disks mirrored for "important" stuff (pictures vdev). Then if one disk fails (assuming both of the disks in one vdev don't fail at the same time) I could simply replace the drive and not lose data?

Thanks so much!

 

[mattbbpl]

TL;DR - If I have 4 x 2TB disks, I can have two disks mirrored for media stuff (media vdev), and the other two disks mirrored for "important" stuff (pictures vdev). Then if one disk fails (assuming both of the disks in one vdev don't fail at the same time) I could simply replace the drive and not lose data?

Thanks so much!

My personal recommendation would be to use one more disk in a RaidZ2 configuration (unless performance is a factor here). That way if ANY TWO disks fail, you're data is still safe. Then you're just treating all of your data as important while using the same number of disks for parity.

But that's just me. Your proposal for two mirrored setups would work as well, although your important data could be lost with just two drives going down.

 

[jde]

2) If I do buy another drive, I (think I) understand that I can't just drop it in and make it a mirror because you can't expand a vdev.

I believe adding a mirror is the exception to the rule that you cannot expand a vdev. See p. 11 of cyberjock's slideshow. See this thread for a discussion on how to do so. https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/create-zfs-mirror-by-adding-a-drive.14880/
I'm not sure, but you may be able to add a mirror from the GUI now. Freenas boot is now a zfs pool and you can add a boot mirror through GUI.

 

[gpsguy]

Yes, that's correct.

While you can add a mirror for the boot device using the webGUI, adding one to your storage pool after the fact, requires command line work. There are several examples in the forum on how to do it.

I believe adding a mirror is the exception to the rule that you cannot expand a vdev.