Storage config for large Volumes

[St Laurence School]

Just installing FreeNAS 9.3 on new box:

• Single Quad Core Processor E5-2609
• 32GB RAM
• No RAID card, using FreeNAS RAID

There are 8 x 3TB SATA3 disks to go in there. I fully expect to lose some of the 24TB of storage through RAID but ideally would like a single volume.

The storage is to be a Time machine backup location for around 50 Macs. It is not mission critical data but we don't want to lose it obviously. How slow\reliable would RAID rebuilding a 20+TB volume be after a drive replacement??

Can someone recommend a volume confguration and RAID level?

 

[joeschmuck]

You should read the user manual and read some of the forum which will answer your questions very easily. Don't be afraid to do a little bit of reading.

 

[St Laurence School]

thanks, really useful.

 

[mav@]

Rebuild of whole 3TB disk by definition can not take less then 8 hours, so it is always not fast. Real rebuild time depends on amount of really stored data (ZFS does not rebuild empty space), data fragmentation (ZFS rebuilds data, not a raw used space) and other system load during rebuild. I don't really know Time machine access pattern, but if that is write-mostly backup load, I would probably try RAIDZ2 pool of all those 8 disks. RAIDZ2 with its two disk redundancy should give you almost all possible reliability during rebuild. RAIDZ1 should give you more storage space, but it won't survive another disk failure during rebuild.