Thoughts on my planned storage extension

[tbatliner]

Hi all,

I'm planning the storage extension of my FreeNAS (11.0.U2) running on my 36bay Supermicro Server. I've got one pool (83% full) which consists of two vdevs (10 x 4TB RAIDZ2).

I'm considering one of two options:

- adding one vdev to existing pool (10 x min. 8TB RAIDZ2) or
- create new pool with one vdev as above

Any ideas/input would be highly appreciated, do you see any pros/cons from one option to the other? Any other (maybe completely different) vdev/pool-design? :) Usage is mainly media storage, so performance isn't critical (and sufficient) at the moment.

Thanks in advance, best regards!

 

[Jailer]

It's a matter of personal preference. Do you want to care for 2 pools or 1? Weigh the pros and cons of each and proceed with whatever works best for you.

Now if it were me I'd expand the pool with an additional vdev of the same configuration as the original. But that's just my preference.

 

[tbatliner]

Thanks Jailer. With "same configuration" I assume you mean 10 disc RAIDZ2, not necessarily same size of discs, correct?

 

[Jailer]

Correct. Keep the number of spindles per vdev the same for performance. It will work otherwise but is not optimal.

 

[tvsjr]

If you're storing all the same type of data (your massive 4K pr0nz library, right?) then I'd make it one pool. IMO, it's only advantageous to split pools when you're using a substantially different drive configuration (for instance, I have two pools... 12 drives for my VM datastore, and another 6 for my movie/file storage) or if you're hammering one pool with IO and want to split the load a bit.