New to freeNas build internal and external drive

[timknight21]

I am looking at building a new nas based around freenas for a new media server, I am looking at building it with 8 internal 3tb hard drives and possible 4 external usb 3.0 3 tb hard drives in a potential raid 5 configuration.

I first wanted to see if this is even possible if freenas can use both internal and external drives in a single raid configuration. I would like to have some sort of reduncancy

any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated

Thanks

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

I am looking at building a new nas based around freenas for a new media server, I am looking at building it with 8 internal 3tb hard drives and possible 4 external usb 3.0 3 tb hard drives in a potential raid 5 configuration.

I first wanted to see if this is even possible if freenas can use both internal and external drives in a single raid configuration. I would like to have some sort of reduncancy

any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated

Thanks

freenas doesn't have raid5, but essentially has the same thing with raidz (1 redundant copy of everything). yes, zpools can span inernal / external disk just fine. I don't know why you'd choose usb3.0 though, I don't know if freenas supports it, though it may in 8.3, you'd want to check. anyway, if the disk aren't meant to stay there most of the time, use sata/esata instead.

also with 12 disks, you probably want to go raidz2 (like raid6) so you have 2 redundant copies of everything.

 

[cyberjock]

Make sure to read the manual. A lot of this information is in there already. FreeNAS does not support USB 3.0 out of the box. It can be enabled per the manual, but USB 3.0 has been known to panic on some motherboards.


In other news, using external hard drives as a permanent setup is not the best idea. All it takes is a few bumps from some cables and it's all over for your data. Everyone who has tried it has later regretted it. There's performance reasons, there's reliability reasons. I really don't know why someone would spend money for a bunch of hard drives, then not try to do a configuration that uses internal drives.

 

[Stephens]

freenas doesn't have raid5, but essentially has the same thing with raidz (1 redundant copy of everything).

I know you know this, but I just want to clarify for people who don't and may read it later... RAIDZ2 doesn't store a redundant copy of everything. That'd be a mirror. RAIDZ1 uses the equivalent of 1 drive (the parity is actually spread across drives) to create parity which can be used to recreate data (on the fly) if a drive is lost.

I wouldn't use external drives. I'd also consider 2 6x3TB RAIDZ2 vdevs in the zpool. One 12x3TB vdev will "waste" less space, but would be a killer to rebuild in case of drive failure.