Raid-Z (4)2TB drives or (7)1TB drives RaidZ ?

[djlax152]

Hi guys, I am building a Raid-Z NAS and had a performance question for anyone who might have some experience with this. Typically i have heard in NAS\SAN solutions that the more drives\spindals in this type of RIAD will result in better performance, particulary with write performance. I am wondering if you guys think that same theory is true with Freenas\ZFS ? Is there a big gain in the performance by throwing spindals at the array or do you guys see little or not much of a difference? I know its probably easier and cheaper for the 2TB drives but I'd prefer to go for performance even if its more expensive. Any thoughts on this?

 

[ser_rhaegar]

If you're using 1GbE, then 4 drives will max your network connection. 7 drives will improve items like scrubs but nothing on the network as you'll already be maxing your connection.

Also I would recommend RaidZ2 or higher with consumer drives.

 

[djlax152]

thanks for the post! I am going to be using (2) GB (LACP) Ethernet ports. So maybe it would be better to do the 7 drives. I didn't know about the maxing out at 1GB thing that was helpful. I am going to use Western Digital Black Drives WD1003FZEX. I think they are considered enterprise drives. I was a little concerned about loosing performance with RAID-Z2 with the double parity

 

[ser_rhaegar]

I was able to max out two 1GbE NICs with RaidZ2 and 4 WD Blacks. This was with multiple clients obviously as a single client/conversation will cap at 1Gb even with 2 NICs in LACP.

I just assumed you had 1 NIC as your OP did not mention anything about your network.