What should my pool look like?

[Tito]

Howdy,

I'm looking at building a new 12 disk FreeNAS box.
What would be the recommended arrangement for the disks?

Would folks recommend simply doing a raidz3 across all 12?
I was thinking of using mirrors to protect the data.

Thanks

 

[styno]

What type of data and usage will you expect to be landing on that pool? For example VM's or media serving (and # of simultaneous users) both require different setups.

 

[Tito]

It will just be for file server and plex, 5 simultaneous transcodes at worst.

 

[depasseg]

I would do RAIDZ3. And if you didn't need all the space, RAIDZ3 with a hot spare.

Mirrors are nice, but it's sounds like you don't need that performance, and the risk of 2 drives in a single mirror crapping out at the same time are greater than any 3 in your pool. If you do Mirrors, make sure you have backups. (Or do 3 way mirrors, but then you'd only have 4 drives of usable space).

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Twelve disks is a bit wide for one vdev. Consider two six-disk RAIDZ2 vdevs.

 

[Mirfster]

Twelve disks is a bit wide for one vdev. Consider two six-disk RAIDZ2 vdevs.

+1