Should I be adding in an extra drive? Advice requested

[calgarychris]

Hi,

I've currently got a FreeNAS system working nicely with 4 x 2TB drives running off an ASUS E35M1-I deluxe motherboard. I have space in the case, spare SATA slots and an old 40GB IDE drive and I was wondering if there's any point to adding a spare drive into the mix. I know it cannot be added as part of my existing zfs pool (I have to create a new vdev or something), but are there any reasons to add another drive (albeit slow and requiring an adapter board). I'm just wondering if anyone out there uses an old drive like this to write logs to or as a swap drive or something. No doubt there's a way to add it, I guess I'm asking if there is any point and for what purpose...

Thanks
Chris

Current system is
ASUS E35M1-I deluxe
4 x 2TB Toshiba drives
8GB RAM
Lian-Li PC-Q08b case

 

[cubix]

No reason that I can think of. Some clever cats are adding SSD drives but I'm yet to be convinced that there's any improvement for small scale NAS systems.

If you 'had' to add another drive, I'd opt for using that spare SATA port over adding an expansion card for an old IDE drive.

 

[calgarychris]

Thanks - I would need the card only to hook the old drive onto the SATA port using a SATA cable. Just trying to re-use what I can, but then again, if there's no point...

I had previously thought of putting another system on it like Ubuntu or FreeBSD, as I was having problems with FreeNAS but now that it's working, I don't really want to mess with it.

When we get to 8.0.2 does anyone know if additional space will be required on the USB stick? Perhaps that would be cause to use the drive then...

Anyway, thanks Cubix

 

[cubix]

No plans to require additional space on the USB stick however if you choose to utilise the plugin system in 8.2.0, the jail would sit in a zfs dataset ie; on the HDD/s, so if you were so inclined that could be on your additional drive.

 

[calgarychris]

No plans to require additional space on the USB stick however if you choose to utilise the plugin system in 8.2.0, the jail would sit in a zfs dataset ie; on the HDD/s, so if you were so inclined that could be on your additional drive.

Well that probably settles it then - isolating the jail to a separate dataset wouldn't improve security, would it? If not, I'll just forget about that drive and use my existing pool, it's big enough...

Thanks

 

[peterh]

Adding 40GB configured as swap will make all other forms of swap unneeded - no more problems
with swap on datadisks, no more need for shurdown when changing failed drives.

( whats left is to configure the system to swap only in your ide-drive, normally you need to
edit /etc/fstab and make shure nothing else will regenerate /etc/fstab . I'm not shure freenas
allows this)