New build, need hard drive ideas

What Hard Drive choise would you use?

  • WD Red

  • WD Red Pro

  • WD RE

  • WD Gold Datacenter


Results are only viewable after voting.
Status
Not open for further replies.

David Henrickson

Explorer
Joined
Jul 26, 2017
Messages
92
Hello,

I am new...actually, this is my first thread. So quite new. Anyway, I want to build a FreeNAS server....maybe down the line 2, so I can have a dedicated backup of the original. I plan on using it for PLEX and most notably for my photos, music and videos. I photograph weddings, sometimes, and I need a very stable backup system. I have been using a DNS-323 and it is WELL past its usable shelf life. Still work! but past it none the less. Its very slow and can only support (2) 2-TB drives max....

I have never had a HD failure and currently have two WD greens (yeah, I know). I want to build a FreeNAS box using a Supermicro board, X5-1650v4 and around 32Gb of ECC ram. Place that in a NORCO box or Rosewill and have 8-20 Hot swap bays available. Now...here's the dilemma. I am not swimming in money and all of this costs money...I get that. I have read that once I chose a ZRAID...I cannot change it. This is the issue. I won't have time (money) to build another raid to off load the data just to change the original RAID to expand (see?). I basically want (6) 6-TB drives (WD RED) for everything and then pool "jail" out the sections. But right now I may only be able to afford (convince the wife) to buy 3-4 4Tb drives (WD RED). What do you see as options? I watch "Byte-My-Bits" a lot and really want to end up with a better version of "Zeus" eventually...just not a dual Xeon. Only single as the X5-1650v4 would actually spank Zeus in terms of power. Is there a way to buy a lot of smaller drives (how many?) and then slowly when money a lots add drives to expand the pool for RaidZ2? I would prefer to have the piece of mind for a dual hard drive failure security. ALL OF THE HELP IS EXTREMELY APPRECIATED!
 

SweetAndLow

Sweet'NASty
Joined
Nov 6, 2013
Messages
6,421
Your can run mirrors and expand your pool by adding more mirrored vdevs. This means you grow at 2 drives and get 50% storage utilization.

You can also go with 4x4TB drives in raidz2 and that will also get you 50% utilization.

I would suggest going with 6 drives of any size that fits your budget and then you can grow that vdev by replacing each drive with larger drives. This is the cheap option up front but will cost the most over time.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk
 

melloa

Wizard
Joined
May 22, 2016
Messages
1,749
I would suggest going with 6 drives of any size that fits your budget and then you can grow that vdev by replacing each drive with larger drives. This is the cheap option up front but will cost the most over time.

ditto.
 

Spearfoot

He of the long foot
Moderator
Joined
May 13, 2015
Messages
2,478
Hello,

I am new...actually, this is my first thread. So quite new. Anyway, I want to build a FreeNAS server....maybe down the line 2, so I can have a dedicated backup of the original. I plan on using it for PLEX and most notably for my photos, music and videos. I photograph weddings, sometimes, and I need a very stable backup system. I have been using a DNS-323 and it is WELL past its usable shelf life. Still work! but past it none the less. Its very slow and can only support (2) 2-TB drives max....

I have never had a HD failure and currently have two WD greens (yeah, I know). I want to build a FreeNAS box using a Supermicro board, X5-1650v4 and around 32Gb of ECC ram. Place that in a NORCO box or Rosewill and have 8-20 Hot swap bays available. Now...here's the dilemma. I am not swimming in money and all of this costs money...I get that. I have read that once I chose a ZRAID...I cannot change it. This is the issue. I won't have time (money) to build another raid to off load the data just to change the original RAID to expand (see?). I basically want (6) 6-TB drives (WD RED) for everything and then pool "jail" out the sections. But right now I may only be able to afford (convince the wife) to buy 3-4 4Tb drives (WD RED). What do you see as options? I watch "Byte-My-Bits" a lot and really want to end up with a better version of "Zeus" eventually...just not a dual Xeon. Only single as the X5-1650v4 would actually spank Zeus in terms of power. Is there a way to buy a lot of smaller drives (how many?) and then slowly when money a lots add drives to expand the pool for RaidZ2? I would prefer to have the piece of mind for a dual hard drive failure security. ALL OF THE HELP IS EXTREMELY APPRECIATED!
Welcome to the forums!

Ah, yes! The old quandary of 'How to get started'!

You're correct that you cannot change a vdev once it's been created... except that you can replace each drive in the vdev and gain more capacity.

Many users find a pool made up of a single 6-disk RAIDZ2 vdev to be more-or-less optimal in terms of storage efficiency (66.7%) and safety.

Suppose, for example, that you start out with a RAIDZ2 array of 6 smaller disks: 2TB for example. This would give you ~8TB (4 x 2TB) of capacity. As time goes by and your better half releases additional funds, you could replace each disk with a larger drive: say, 6TB. Eventually, once you've replaced all 6 drives, you'll end up with ~24TB of capacity (4 x 6TB). The caveat is that you won't see any of the additional drive capacity until you've replaced all 6 disks...

An alternative approach is to use mirrors. At 50%, these aren't efficient... but it's easy to expand your pool by adding additional mirrored pairs. So you could start out simple, for example, with a pair of 6TB drives, giving you 6TB of capacity. As funds become available, you could add as many additional mirrored pairs to the pool as you please. These new pairs can differ in size compared to your existing setup, too, i.e., you could add a pair of 8TB drives to your original pair of 6TB units and have 14TB of capacity.

Hope this helps you get started... good luck!
 
Joined
Feb 2, 2016
Messages
574
Drive brand is completely irrelevant to me, David.

My companies buys HP refurbished desktops with 2TB drives because they are super cheap. We immediately remove the 2TB drive and replace it with a 128GB SSD - desktops need responsiveness not storage space. Whatever 2TB drive arrived with the desktop ends up as a storage drive in FreeNAS. In addition to the random, two dozen 2TB drives we have in various FreeNAS deployments, we have half a dozen random 2TB drives on the shelf right now to use as spares if the any of the live drives fail. Good redundancy, good backups, good monitoring and good procedures mean that you can pretty much use whatever you have available for disks.

If you're buying new, WD Red is sensible.

As for disk layout, my advice will be different if you have eight bays available versus 20 bays available.

If you only have eight bays available, go with large drives and in quantity you'll need for your next three years of storage.

If you have 20 bays available, it doesn't really matter. The entire system will be obsolete before you run out of bays. Right now you only have 2TB online? Throw four drives of your choosing (2 or 4TB) in the box and you've more than doubled what you have now. As you need more space, add drives in mirrored pairs.

For photo and video editing, RAIDZ2 will be slower than a group of mirrors. Editing performance with Lightroom is much better with a mirrored stripe than a single, large RAIDZ2 volume.

Cheers,
Matt
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top