WHS to FreeNAS

[Raheel]

Hi,

I want to move away from an old Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS) build and am considering a FreeNAS solution. This is for a home office set up. I have on order a Dell PowerEdge T130 Tower Server (Xeon E3-1230, 8GB ECC RAM, 500GB HDD) which will be my server. I am new to this, so any helpful and detailed responses would be greatly appreciated.

1) The goals for the setup would be to store all my photos, videos and documents, as well as be a plex media server and do computer backups. Additionally, I would like to set up CouchPotato and SickBeard. In the future I would also like to incorporate ownCloud. Would FreeNAS be able to support all this?

2) I am completely clueless on how to set up my storage. Currently, on the WHS, I have a 3TB and a 1TB drive and would like to continue using them due to limited funds at the moment. I have set up duplication for my photos and documents but not for my videos. Is there a solution that would allow me to continue using these drives in the short term, while providing redundancy for my photos and documents (under 1 TB).

3) For the long term, what would be the optimal set up for storage? I would like to move towards 4TB drives. Would that mean that the drives I have right now will not work in that set up?

Thanks for the help!

 

[danb35]

Would FreeNAS be able to support all this?

Yes, all of the things you mention are available as plugins.

Is there a solution that would allow me to continue using these drives in the short term, while providing redundancy for my photos and documents (under 1 TB).

Not really, at least not without some nasty hacking on the command line (which is discouraged)*. It's easy enough to set up each disk as its own pool (volume), but of course that means you don't have any redundancy, and whatever data you had on that disk is lost. You can also stripe the two disks together into a single volume, which consolidates all your capacity, but means that you'll lose all your data when either of the disks fails.

I would like to move towards 4TB drives. Would that mean that the drives I have right now will not work in that set up?

It'd be hard to come up with a configuration that would make good use of your existing disks as well as a set of 4 TB disks. The closest I can think of would be if you bought, say, three 4 TB disks, and combined them with your existing 3 TB disk in a RAIDZ2 pool. That would give you 6 TB of net capacity, and would be able to survive the failure of any two disks without any data loss. Later, you could replace the 3 TB disk with another 4 TB disk, and your pool capacity would increase to 8 TB.

ZFS does a lot of things differently than most other filesystems. You should read through @cyberjock's presentation on the subject; it will help you avoid many common pitfalls.

* You could partition the 3 TB disk into a 2 TB and a 1 TB partition, create a ZFS mirror with the 1 TB disk and the 1 TB partition, and a separate ZFS pool on the 2 TB partition. The data on the 1 TB pool would be protected against the failure of either disk, but if the 3 TB disk died you'd lose any of the data on the 2 TB partition. But, again, this configuration would require a bit of tinkering behind the GUI's back, which is generally discouraged.

 

[Raheel]

Thank you for the detailed response!

The server arrives tomorrow, and I am anxious to start using FreeNAS. My goal is to have four 4TB drives running in RAIDZ2 (The server has a limit of 4 HDDs). However, my current budget does not allow that at the moment and I am also holding out for some good deals on Black Friday.

Meanwhile, I have a 3TB, 2TB and a 1TB HDD available. I have only about 2.2TB of data.

Is there a way to get started with the drives I have without doing any non-recommended tinkering?
If not, in the short term can I run FreeNAS without any redundancy at all and have the server do backups to an external HDD (I have a 5TB external HDD)?
Is it a simple process to switch to RAIDZ2 once I have the 4TB drives later this year?

 

[Stux]

Copy the data to your 3TB.

Install the 1&2 TB. Make it into a striped pool. No redundancy.

Copy the data to the pool.

Use command line hackery to partition the 3TB drive into 1 & 2 TB partitions. Add said partitions to the existing stripes to make mirrors.

You now have 3TB of redundant storage.

...

Alternatively, you just add the 3 drives as stripes. You get 6TB. If any drive fails (quite likely) you lose the array. But you have a backup.