Need confirmation my idea / plan will work

[Rocco Speranza]

My friend and I are about to build a FreeNAS server for the first time, both being nearly identical besides CPU.
Cost is a bit of a concern at first so we are trying to start with (2) 8TB drives.
Initially, we are going to mirror the drive to have 8TB of total storage which will work fine for the next year.
Ultimately, we'll want double parity. We are thinking Raidz2 using (6) 8TB drives for a total storage of 32TB.

Few Questions:

1. Will Raidz2 be our best bet?
   
2. Assuming yes for questions 1, could we safely migrate data from the mirror to an external drive and back to the new Raidz2 vdev / pool?
3. Years down the road once 10Gb comes down in price, could we purchase a board like this, will we be able to put the board in place with out issues or does the vdev / pool need to be rebuilt?
   
4. Will 32GB of Ram be enough once we upgrade? We are to start with 16GB.

Thanks in advance!

 

[joeschmuck]

Oh no, that plan will fail terribly! ;)

Seriously, the answers:
1) Yes
2) Typically Yes but there is risk of course.
3) Yes, you can move your hard drives to basically any computer that meets the minimum hardware specs and boot things up and be off and running.
4) You didn't list what you plan to do with FreeNAS but 16GB is a reasonable place to start. If you plan to run lots of VMs then maybe 32GB is required. Leave yourself the ability to expand your RAM by just adding more RAM modules, not replacing current ones. This will save you money.

 

[Rocco Speranza]

Oh no, that plan will fail terribly! ;)

Seriously, the answers:
1) Yes
2) Typically Yes but there is risk of course.
3) Yes, you can move your hard drives to basically any computer that meets the minimum hardware specs and boot things up and be off and running.
4) You didn't list what you plan to do with FreeNAS but 16GB is a reasonable place to start. If you plan to run lots of VMs then maybe 32GB is required. Leave yourself the ability to expand your RAM by just adding more RAM modules, not replacing current ones. This will save you money.

Awesome! I might have changed my mind on going to such a large storage array. The only reason I'd need even close to that size is because of my Plex media, I've thought about using Unraid for that and Freenas for everything else. I still have to do some research though to make sure it'll work how I need it.

Good to know about 3)
I was going to post in "Will it FreeNAS" for that, but Plex is a definite, really not quite sure on everything really at this point. There are a lot of sweet plug-ins I will want to try once setup. I'd assume 16GB would be plenty if I only keep 8TB of storage?

 

[joeschmuck]

While 8GB is the minimum, we tend to recommend 16GB more these days because FreeNAS is no longer just a NAS, it's also a Type 2 Hypervisor and people are just doing more with it. 16GB is more than fine for Plex but if you plan to run other VMs like Ubuntu or Windows on FreeNAS (which I personally wouldn't do, I'd use ESXi, well looky there, I do that already :) ) then you would need more RAM for a responsive machine.

 

[Rocco Speranza]

While 8GB is the minimum, we tend to recommend 16GB more these days because FreeNAS is no longer just a NAS, it's also a Type 2 Hypervisor and people are just doing more with it. 16GB is more than fine for Plex but if you plan to run other VMs like Ubuntu or Windows on FreeNAS (which I personally wouldn't do, I'd use ESXi, well looky there, I do that already :) ) then you would need more RAM for a responsive machine.

I might consider running VMs, but this is more for home media storage / Video storage for my video editing.
After a little more thinking, will likely just bite the bullet and do the one Freenas server. What I'm dreading is the data migration / cost to buy an additional (4) 8TB drives / rebuilding the array. Once that is done, I'd plan to be set for a number of years. XD

16GB ECC is guaranteed, if needed, 32 will be in the future. Thanks for the help, now to post the hardware build!

 

[joeschmuck]

Video Editing? Now you opened up a can of worms. If you plan to edit the files on FreeNAS or if you plan to copy the files to a local computer and edit there makes a huge difference. The first would require much more money and a real design to ensure the data flow you would need. If you are copying the files over then any minimum spec machine would do fine. We have in the past has people strongly desire to do serious video editing right on FreeNAS. I don't recall the outcome but we all recommended high end hardware and an optimal vdev design in order to ensure data flowed fast and seamlessly.

Also, if you are using Plex for transcoding video for streaming, at least get a decent CPU, especially if you ever plan to stream 4K or have multiple streams.

 

[Rocco Speranza]

Would be nice to have the capability, but guess I should just start editing on my SSD. I currently edit from an external 8TB drive shared from another Windows computer, couldn't belive editing from a dedicated NAS would feel slower. That computer is my currently plex server. I plan to utilize it's 4130T i3 CPU. I can do (2) 720P w/ (1) 1080P steam. This is perfect right now as the most I've used is (2) 720P steams. My internet is slow. :'(

I made a post asking about my hardware choice.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/1st-freenas-server-build-for-my-friend-and-i.54434/

 

[joeschmuck]

The speed will depend on what you are editing. The file sharing alone isn't the killer, it's the bandwidth of the network connection. If you are fine with your current network connection speed then I would assume it would have a similar result but if you want better then you might consider either a faster network like 10GbE or you could do something a bit different but it would be significantly faster in bandwidth but it depends on the hardware. You could run ESXi on a server and then run a VM of FreeNAS and a VM of Windoze and because they both reside on the same physical machine, the transfer speed of data is outstanding. There is a lot of understanding to get this but it's not a bad option, unless you have a high end editing machine already of course.

So don't let me scare you away from building a FreeNAS machine, like I said, if you are okay with your current network speed, I don't see any reason FreeNAS wouldn't excel sharing files the same way that your Windoze machine is doing.

I'll go check your other posting.

 

[Stux]

Two types of video editors, those who expect professional grade performance and those who are happy with amateur grade performance.

The funny thing is that whether you are a professional or amateur video editor isn't indicative of which category you fall into ;)

Professional grade performance is expensive.