Slightly confused with FreeNAS build

[Skilty]

I ran FreeNAS7 quite some time back and then switched to a HP N40L microserver running Windows Server 2008 r2 plus snapRAID.

My storage pool is now at 11TB and made up of the following:

3TB Parity
3TB Data
3TB Data
2TB Data
1.5TB Data
1.5TB Data

My question is whether to continue along this route and simply start upgrading the smaller drives to 3TB models or look at something a little more resilient. The server hosts my DVD and bluray collection in orginal format and also serves five AppleTV2s around the house with m4v. Server currently has iTunes installed on it to enable Home Sharing.

So far my thoughts are use the N40L as the iTunes server and build a FreeNAS8.2 server using an existing AMD Athlon X2 7750 CPU, motherboard and memory or buy a Intel Xeon quad core.

I also have the follow kit sitting in a wardrobe:

AMD 7750 (dual core) CPU plus motherboard and 8GB memory, would this be sufficient to run FreeNAS?

The only issue is that I need to recycle the storage devices as I go (I will be buying another two 3TB drives to start).

Biggest question, I understand that pools are made up of vdevs and that data is striped across the pool. So I plan on putting two device in a vdev and mirror them and add them to the pool. Copy data onto it, then create the next vdev with two disks (mirrored) add it to the pool and then copy the next lot.

Will this cause any issues or affect the striping? Will be adding ZIL and L2ARC SSDs at a later date.

Cheers!

 

[ben]

Adding one vdev at a time like that will stress the newer disks disproportionately until things even out, and may lead to some performance anomalies while that's the case. However in the long term it won't matter a huge amount as long as you do regular scrubs and follow general best practices. Remember, a ZIL only really helps for writes on NFS shares and, on 8.2 at least, is a single point of failure for the whole pool.

 

[Skilty]

I was planning on virtualising using ESXi 5, is vt-x,vt-d or IOMMU essential for this? Or is it better to have FreeNAS on dedicated hardware? I don't want to lose any performance with FreeNAS accessing the storage so assume that the storage devices would need to passed through to the VM FreeNAS would be running in.