New FreeNAS Build and General Questions

[Tamagatchi]

Hi all,

I've been planning a file/media server options for the past few weeks. My initial thought was to get a Synology/QNAP and slap some hard drives. Though the hardware they utilize seems underpowered for the price to pay for convenience and the need to hot swap drives is nice but completely unnecessary. I also love building my own computers and customizing them to my needs, so here I am.

After reading some of the material I found tutorials from this forum and around the web. I decide to this following build:

http://pcpartpicker.com/list/JbHbhq

Oh and I have a 16GB USB 3.0 flashdrive from Samsung for the OS.

Please let me know what you guys think.


General questions:
1. ZFS "volume" and "pool" the same thing?

2. From my understanding. Once a ZFS pool is setup with a number of hard drives, I cannot change the number of drives for that pool, but I can enlarge them by swapping out existing hard drives for larger ones. Is that true?

3. The suggested RAM to hard drive space ratio is referring to the total RAID space or usable hard drive space?

4. Is it possible for FreeNAS to suspend/sleep the system when there has not been any queries or access to the system and then wake via ethernet?

Thanks. >.<

 

[danb35]

ZFS "volume" and "pool" the same thing?

Correct.

From my understanding. Once a ZFS pool is setup with a number of hard drives, I cannot change the number of drives for that pool, but I can enlarge them by swapping out existing hard drives for larger ones. Is that true?

Not quite. You can add redundant groups of drives, and keep a safe, redundant pool. You can add individual drives, but you'll mess up your redundancy that way. See https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/ for more detail.

The suggested RAM to hard drive space ratio is referring to the total RAID space or usable hard drive space?

It's deliberately vague. A single 16 GB stick would probably be adequate for you; the 32 GB you have in your build will almost certainly be plenty for whatever you're going to do at home.

Is it possible for FreeNAS to suspend/sleep the system when there has not been any queries or access to the system and then wake via ethernet?

Not really, unfortunately.