Seagate Green Drives on FreeNAS + Additional Questions

[egrimisu]

Hi guys,

I have bought 4 x Seagate 2TB Green 5900rpm ST2000DL003 drivers to use them on a hardware raid5 (perc6i) and after a few days i found on the net that they lack TLER, so building a hardware raid array is useless, if a drive "develop" bad sectors the array will result in corupted data.

So what i plane to do is build FreeNAS box using these drivers on a HP Micro Server on a raidz1 array (similar to raid 5) with zfs. freenas os will be installed on a usb stick.
This is a home server and i'll store media files on it with very few simultaneous access, 1 max 3 connection at once.

and now the questions:
1. are these green drives safe on a raidz1 array ? it is guaranteed that if a disk fail, only by replacing one thing will get back to normal, if not shall i use raidz2 (raid6 similar).

2. Are 1gb of ram enough for my requirements (keep in mind that only 3 pc's will access the box), if not 4gb will do the trick?

3. since i haven't yet bought the server can i build the array on these disks on a temporary pc and then can i migrate them on the server, with easy steps?

4. if the usb memory stick fails on witch freenas is installed, replacing the the stick and copying the latest settings backup will restore my array?

4.1. does freenas have a settings backup/restore functions?

Basicly i would like to know if i can rely on freenas completely if built corectly.
Tips are also welcomed.

Thanks in advance,
Misu

 

[Tekkie]

Yes you can rely on FreeNAS, but... FN8 lacks robustness when it comes to some of the functionality you'd expect, meaning you will have to fall back to a unix shell to do some things, like replacing a bad drive for example.
1) Yes
2) ZFS requires memory because of how it was architected, don't safe money in the wrong place.
3) Yes but you may require manual intervention, i.e. unix shell to do this.
4) No tried this, but I do hope so! :)
4.1) Yes.

 

[egrimisu]

Yes you can rely on FreeNAS, but... FN8 lacks robustness when it comes to some of the functionality you'd expect, meaning you will have to fall back to a unix shell to do some things, like replacing a bad drive for example.
1) Yes
2) ZFS requires memory because of how it was architected, don't safe money in the wrong place.
3) Yes but you may require manual intervention, i.e. unix shell to do this.
4) No tried this, but I do hope so! :)
4.1) Yes.

3. is there a guide somewhere, or people here on the forum could help in case of a dezaster?