Noob from Unraid simple drive config question.

[matt_b]

Building small home TrueNas scale server.
Wanting around 6-8TB usable storage.
Storage Pool - is there much speed and parity difference between 2 - 6tb drives mirror vs 3 - 4tb drives?

Also, Should can I do two small SSD mirror drives for boot (is that smart).

Would I run apps on the boot mirror or on the main storage pool?
This is NOT heavy usage like Plex. I just want good performance and drive redundancy.

Thanks

 

[morganL]

Building small home TrueNas scale server.
Wanting around 6-8TB usable storage.
Storage Pool - is there much speed and parity difference between 2 - 6tb drives mirror vs 3 - 4tb drives?

Also, Should can I do two small SSD mirror drives for boot (is that smart).

Would I run apps on the boot mirror or on the main storage pool?
This is NOT heavy usage like Plex. I just want good performance and drive redundancy.

Thanks

Mirror is actually faster.. can read from either drive

Single boot drive is best... if drive is reliable

Apps on main storage pool....

 

[ChrisRJ]

@matt_b , welcome to the forum!

Your questions indicate that you have not spent much time with TrueNAS and ZFS yet. That is fine, as long as you are aware that both require a lot of special knowledge. In the last couple of months quite a few people came here, who had seen a YouTube video that "showed" how easy it is to run TrueNAS. In my opinion those videos are garbage, misleading, and border-line dangerous. They are purely entertainment and skip the part where it should say "ZFS and TrueNAS are enterprise products, designed for high-end storage systems, and you need to spend a lot of time to understand them".

I don't want to scare you off !! TrueNAS is a wonderful system and offers capabilities for which other vendors charge a 5 or 6 digit-figure amount of money. But it is not comparable with Synology etc. in terms of convenience and ease-of-use. Instead you need to spend time to learn about it. That is the deal for getting it "for free".

For starters, please have a look at the "recommended readings" in my signatures. Those will give you a good overview what you are about to get yourself into ;-).

Good luck!

 

[matt_b]

Chris and Morgan, thanks for raking the time to respond!

Chris, thanks and I will start on your recommend readings. I dont necessarily agree with your take though. I fired up TrueNas a month ago, used an old desktop laying around with 4gb ram, put 2 ssd drives (boot, cache) and 2 larger for hdd storage pool. Spun up a couple containers that worked!! very cool. Parts of it a more intuitive then Unraid. If TrueNas wasnt consumer, weekend warrior, Dad has another job not in IT, then I wouldnt mess with it. But I enjoy and vaule the FOS enterprise level of it. This allowed me to learn. I read some and study some. I find the youtube vids (Lawrence systems) to be very helpful and knowledgeable. If nothing else, they give me the direction to got to learn.

Your right in that I really dont care about ZFS or what raid level. I just want storage that can run 6-8TB usable, with parity. I dont care what kind of parity. and learn if cache really helps, and if i need parity on the boot drives... I research a TON but dont always have time to learn all these details and sometimea I cheat and just want to know what to do. I learn enough to set it up, implement it, fix it and move on to next fun thing. The is half use and half enjoyment. My unifi UDMpro network is growing and doing great. Next I want to learn high availability clusters and proxmox. I dont want to know every detail about them, but enough to spin them up and fix a problem.

Again, thanks a bunch for caring enough to take the time and effort to respond!!

 

[matt_b]

Correction, test server was 8gb. Now i know i like Truenas and will work, just bought HP Z440 Workstation Xeon E5-2680 V3 @ 3.30GHz 12C 32GB.

Just trying to decide if 3 - 4TB are better or worse then 2 - 6TB drives.

WD has special now on WD red plus 6TB buy 2 for $200 free shipping...

 

[HoneyBadger]

Hi @matt_b

Welcome to the forums! Glad to see you're selecting the WD Red Plus (that last word being crucial) as you'll avoid having to learn about "Shingled Magnetic Recording" technology the hard way. (The short version is "Watch for and avoid.")

Generally speaking, for a simple home file server use case you won't need to worry too much about teasing out performance differences between vdev layouts. The main difference in this situation is the ease of expanding, which will be much easier with two mirrored drives (simply add two more in another mirror) versus a RAIDZ1 (where you'd want to add three drives at a time)

Once you start looking at using it to provide shared storage to something like a ProxMox or vSphere cluster, then performance differences start to matter more, and are also where things like cache and log drives start to be valuable.

 

[ChrisRJ]

I find the youtube vids (Lawrence systems) to be very helpful and knowledgeable.

You are correct, I was probably too general. This is indeed the only channel I am aware of that does not oversell. Thanks for pointing it out.