Recommendations for storage upgrades?

[ISJ]

Hello,

Say I have a system which comprises of:
- 8-Port Mobo
- 8 Port HBA
- 10x 10TB drives in zraid (RAID5)

I want to expand this later to 16x 10TB drives, what choices do I have? I really don't want to use UnRaid cause honestly I don't like closed source but its going to be a hell of challenge for a home user to store 50TB while migrating to a rebuild zpool.

Should I only use 8 drives in parity then add another zpool and stripe the two RAID 5's together to make a RAID 50?

Thanks for any options.

 

[NugentS]

First - RAIDZ1 is not reccomended for disks bigger than 4TB
Second - Your 10 wide array is about as wide as you want it to be

Short answer: Add additional drives as a second vdev - but make sure you have a decent backup as your Z1 is not ideal.

Longer - better answer: Ideally make sure you have a backup then set it up anew as 2 vdevs of RAIDZ2. Each vdev 8 wide with 2 parity disks each

 

[Arwen]

It's helpful to use the correct terminology. ZFS uses RAID-Z1 for single parity, (similar but not the same as RAID-5).

A ZFS pool can have 2 vDevs, (Virtual Devices). vDevs consist of RAID-Zx units, (for your case). So you can't stripe 2 pools together, each with their own RAID-Z1 vDev. But, you can have a single ZFS pool with 2 vDevs;

8 x 10TB disks in RAID-Z1
8 x 10TB disks in RAID-Z1

ZFS will generally stripe across vDevs. ZFS will try and balance the space used in each vDev, even if that means not striping writes. While you can have asymmetrical vDevs, (first vDev of 10 x 10TB disks, and later add a second vDev of 6 x 10TB disks), performance & storage density can be irregular. Thus, not recommended.

Here is a terminology primer;

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer

We realize that new users have a lot to learn when they come to FreeNAS. There's a certain amount of confusion added to discussions when users pick random/approximate terms to describe things. I've spent a lot of time quietly trying to...

www.truenas.com

Last, you can build your ZFS pool with a single vDev of 8 x 10TB disks using RAID-Zx. Then later expand the pool using another 8 x 10TB disks using RAID-Zx.

As @NugentS wrote, using RAID-Z1 with huge disks is not recommended. Using RAID-Z2, (similar to, but not the same as RAID-6), is a better choice. Though of course using 2 disks for parity reduces usable storage.