Upgrade time need advice

[mrramsey]

Greetings all - I have had my freenas box going for a couple of years now, maybe three. I can say it has been fairly bulletproof. I was in a bind when I first set it up so I am sure it is by far not optimal. My drives are aging and I am starting to think I should replace them. I repurposed an old workstation for the box. Here are the current specs:

Dell precision t3500
Intel Xeon W3505 CPU @ 2.53GHz
8 GB RAM
2x 2TB WD Caviar Black drives Mirrored

I am at about 50% capacity on my current storage so was thinking of upgrading that as well. there are 5 sata ports on the mobo but I would have to find a way to mount the additional drives. would I be better off just doing 2x 4TB drives mirrored or do 4x 2TB in a Z1 assuming t˙at would be similar to a raid5 and give me ~6tb capacity with 2 tb parity??

For drives I was thinking of the WD Red NAS drives. Currently the system pulls about 72 watts. I was initially thinking of downgrading to a dedicated ready built NAS like a synology 218+ from a power perspective it is attractive at around 17watts. I havent used a nas in any capacity for transcoding like plex. Not a high priority but I also don't want to lose any data transfer performance. I store mainly hi res photos and music.

Also if I were to migrate to a 4 drive set up how would it be best to transfer the existing data to the new array?

Open to suggestions

 

[garm]

Don’t run raidz1, it’s insufficient redundancy to survive a disk replacement with a comfortable margin of error. The OpenZFS team also discourages the use with large drives for the same reason.

Some people will tell you to run raidz2 with four drives, but I stick to mirrors. You get an extra vdev for better IOPS and what you loose in redundancy (you can not loose the second disk in a mirror pair during resilver) you gain in resilver speed. Resilvering a mirror pair is done in hours, not days.

I have never had to dump an entire pool before, but I have planned for it. What I would do is to set up a single disk pool on an esata disk and do zfs send. There is a resource for just this use case, but as a continuous backup solution.

ZFS is a resource hog, but there are legitimate ways of building a low idle powered NAS using FreeNAS as well.

 

[Chris Moore]

Some people will tell you to run raidz2 with four drives, but I stick to mirrors. You get an extra vdev for better IOPS and what you loose in redundancy (you can not loose the second disk in a mirror pair during resilver) you gain in resilver speed. Resilvering a mirror pair is done in hours, not days.

I have a pool of 12 drives in 2 vdevs that are RAIDz2. The pool will resilver a replacement disk in about 4 hours, not days. The speed of the resilver is affected by the hardware and pool design, but with good design, the limit is how fast the new drive can write data and that doesn't care if it is a mirror or RAIDz.


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[Chris Moore]

Greetings all - I have had my freenas box going for a couple of years now, maybe three. I can say it has been fairly bulletproof. I was in a bind when I first set it up so I am sure it is by far not optimal. My drives are aging and I am starting to think I should replace them. I repurposed an old workstation for the box. Here are the current specs:

Dell precision t3500
Intel Xeon W3505 CPU @ 2.53GHz
8 GB RAM
2x 2TB WD Caviar Black drives Mirrored

I am at about 50% capacity on my current storage so was thinking of upgrading that as well. there are 5 sata ports on the mobo but I would have to find a way to mount the additional drives. would I be better off just doing 2x 4TB drives mirrored or do 4x 2TB in a Z1 assuming t˙at would be similar to a raid5 and give me ~6tb capacity with 2 tb parity??

For drives I was thinking of the WD Red NAS drives. Currently the system pulls about 72 watts. I was initially thinking of downgrading to a dedicated ready built NAS like a synology 218+ from a power perspective it is attractive at around 17watts. I havent used a nas in any capacity for transcoding like plex. Not a high priority but I also don't want to lose any data transfer performance. I store mainly hi res photos and music.

Also if I were to migrate to a 4 drive set up how would it be best to transfer the existing data to the new array?

Open to suggestions

I had a Dell T310 for a NAS once, and it isn't a bad system.
For this small configuration, you really can't get a lower price than to double the storage by just adding 2 more drives. Stay with the 2TB models because the built-in SATA ports don't know what to do with the bigger drives.
If you want to run PLEX media server in a jail, the T3500 can be upgraded to a 6 core 3.4GHz Xeon and 24GB of ECC memory.
You would need some 3.5" to 5.25" brackets for the CD bays to mount the HDDs. That's what I did for my first through fourth NAS builds.

You might want to start planning for the next expansion though, because it will be a bigger change.

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