New to FreeNAS - Need some advice on best practices

[FreeNASUser5129]

Hey Everyone,

I'm brand-new to FreeNAS, but found it straightforward to setup and get rolling. I have a new hardware box which I built with 3x2 TB HDDs in a RAID-Z1 array.

So, I'm wondering what the best-practice approaches are for storing files and setting up shares. Right now I have setup a bunch of ZFS Datasets for things like 'Pictures' and 'Home Videos', then used those data sets as the default path for my CIFC shares. It's kind of cool to be able to set a limit (like 10G on the Pictures folder) and have a shared drive that I can map to Windows which reflects a drive with 10 GB of space.

I am curious, however, whether this is the best way to set things up. I don't know how I can see the actual amount of overall remaining space on my RAID-Z, and I've noticed that I can create shares with capacities which far exceed the space that I have physically available. I would also like to know whether it will be easy for me to expand my ZFS Datasets when I decide that I need more space, and add 3 more drives for a second ZFS Volume.

Should I just have left the single ZFS Dataset (with all of the capacity) as-is and setup a single CIFC share with folders underneath? Better to change it now than after I transfer everything over.

Thanks for any advice!

 

[lrusak]

Have a look through this

http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide

 

[kbarb]

I'm a bit new to this to give you direct answers, but here is a page about expanding the pools from a guy building a Solaris box w/ ZFS.
He goes step by step - not sure if it's a transferable answer but all the commands are there.

Home Fileserver: RAIDZ expansion
http://breden.org.uk/2008/09/01/home-fileserver-raidz-expansion/

His whole project is a pretty good read, although I've only read a few pages.
http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/

Also see question #2 for some appropriate links :
http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...ep-getting-Asked-amp-Answered-about-FreeNAS-8

And I think the Freenas Docs>>manual has something on expanding.