New build for home office

[Ilfracombe]

Hi,

I am looking to build a small home office NAS, after reading many posts I am still a bit lost as to how best to utilise the hardware.

I have a spare HP Z440, E5-1650v4, 64GB EEC DDR4, 500GB SSD on SATA to boot and an Adaptec 6405 with 4x4TB SAS, Additional 2x Gigabit LAN.
The main purpose of this NAS is to hold lots of image and CAD files, with 5-6 users accessing it.
Do I use Adaptec to RAID10 ? RAID6 ? or Allow TrueNAS to deal with the redundancy ?
I don't mind losing two drives as long as the data is super safe and fast to read because a lot of projects are stored and work on over a period of a few years.

My main concern is, I know Windows really well so when anything goes wrong I know how to fix it, from dead OS to broken RAID, but with TrueNAS it is a new scene for me, so some backup advice on this build would be much appreciated.

Thanks for your help.

 

[jgreco]

Do I use Adaptec to RAID10 ? RAID6 ? or Allow TrueNAS to deal with the redundancy ?

You don't really have an option here. Not only will TrueNAS need to be the place to deal with redundancy, because that's what ZFS does, but also the Adaptec card has to get replaced. You can use a proper LSI HBA since you have SAS disks.

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com

 

[Ilfracombe]

Thanks for the info.
As the Z440 has 6xSATA3 ports, what would be the advantage of using a HBA card over the onboard SATA3 as they are all running as non-Raid drives ? I understand the SAS are better at read/write at the same time, but other than that, what other advantages am I missing from using SATA3 drives ?

 

[jgreco]

As the Z440 has 6xSATA3 ports, what would be the advantage of using a HBA card over the onboard SATA3 as they are all running as non-Raid drives ?

The advantage to the HBA is that you cannot drive your SAS drives from SATA3 mainboard ports. The HBA will work, the mainboard SATA3 won't. I view that as a "slight" advantage.

I understand the SAS are better at read/write at the same time,

Basically close to meaningless, as drives are nowhere near as fast as the SATA/SAS connection.

what other advantages am I missing from using SATA3 drives ?

SATA drives tend to be big, cheap, and readily available. If I experience a failure with a 12TB or 14TB WD Red, I can go to Best Buy and have a shuckable WD EasyStore of similar or larger size in an hour.

 

[Arwen]

One note on redundancy with 4 drives:

• 2, 2 way Mirrored vDevs can be faster for reads and can process more IOPS
• Single 4 disk RAID-Z2 vDev will have the same amount of storage as above, but safer because you can loose any 2 disks without data loss.

So it is somewhat a trade off: Safety of RAID-Z2 verses higher speeds possible with 2 Mirrored vDevs.