Rebuild or Start New?

[redham]

Got IPMI interface working on my Win7 machines but it seems to be such a PITA in Win10. Reloaded Freenas and got another GPT table fail and stalled out the system entirely. Did another format on uploaded and got both boot drives to working.

Installed 4 x 8gig drives and went with Z1. Installed plex and got it somewhat working so far.

My original plan was to install 4 drives first, do a data migration to the freenas server to free up the other 4 drives. Then I would setup anther Z1 with the last 4 drives. After some reading though it would appear that a Z2 with 8 drives would be a much more efficient and reliable configuration than 2 Z1 arrays with the same amount of drives. I will re-shuffle my all my data to allow me to setup all 8 drives together at once.


I have 48 gigs ram installed. The ebay seller only had 3 slabs at the time. I have noticed that big transfers was eating all the ram. I was going round it up to 64gigs but since I am ordering again, would going to 96 gigs be a major jump in performance?

 

[Apollo]

I have 48 gigs ram installed. The ebay seller only had 3 slabs at the time. I have noticed that big transfers was eating all the ram. I was going round it up to 64gigs but since I am ordering again, would going to 96 gigs be a major jump in performance?

Not necessarily. Replication will max out your RAM. Plex wouldn't really make use of it unless you watch the same movie over and over.
48GB should be plenty, but it also depends on your workload.
If you can afford going to 96GB, then do it, but it could be overkill for some.
You can look at ARC hit ration and see from there if more RAM would be usefful.
If you could add 2 more 8Gig drives, it would be more efficient to go with 2x 5 RAIDZ2 (better system response and redundancy).

 

[redham]

I forgot that I have an extra 8tb drive so I actually have 9 total. I re-purposed one of my Lenovo ts440 cases which only has 8 hot swap bays. If I move to 10 drives I would have to get very creative with mounting 2 more drives and change up the cabling setup. Currently, the two sas ports on the raid card ports are connected to the 2 drive cages. In order for me to add more drives I would need to free up one port for a sas to sata breakout cable and add a Y splitter for the Sas to backplanes?

I guess I will stay with the 48gig ram for now and get everything up and running again.

My psu situation is not working our very well. I have a new Corsair hx1000w sitting around for a long time that I never used. Even though it is new, there is a problem with the fan spinning to ultra high speed 15 seconds after I start the server. I dont have a receipt anymore so Corsair may or may not take it under warranty. So I ordered EVGA 850 Gold PSU which chipped another $116 with taxes and shipping. There is a $20 rebate, but the expenditure was not budgeted.

 

[Apollo]

If you were willing to move to the 10 drive configuration, but decide to go with the 9 drives for now, you could build your first vdev out of 5 disk RAIDZ2, then you could remove one of the disk. The pool will be in a degraded state but will still have RAIDZ1 redundancy until the drive is inserted again. But you don't want to reattach the drive just yet.
At least you can add it again and instead of attaching t back, you wipe its content.
Then you can add the remaining 4 drives and create an extended pool with 5 disk RAIDZ2 vedv.
The result should be theroritically 2x5 disk RAIDZ2 vdev forming your pool.

You will get redundancy of RAIDZ2 for the norml vdev and redundancy of RAIDZ1 for the degraded vdev until a new disk is added to rebuild redundancy.
With this approach you will right away benefit from the 2 vdev with only 9 disks.

 

[redham]

Looks like I will be scraping this build. The Lenovo TS440 case is maxed out at 8 pool drives. With the added cost of the PSU and the cost of modifying the system to go to 10 drives it would make more sense for me to go with this solution instead:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07QFG4QWB/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

When I get the ram situation sorted out with the help of CM, I will probably start with a 5 X 8 TB Z2 vdev first and move my bulky media there to me going. I have to do a little bit of shucking after this.