mael
Dabbler
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2013
- Messages
- 20
Okay, I've read the manual cover to cover and about thirty links from it and some more branching off of it. All the vids from it and a few others. I should've probably stuck to the guide and come and asked my questions, because now I think I've merged together a bunch of Solaris/ZFS specific stuff into the FreeNAS jumble of questions I already had. If something doesn't pertain to FreeNAS, please let me know.
So, I think I'm finally ready to try to set up my system, but I have a few questions. Please bear with me, I am after all a n00b lol.
I want to see if what I'm planning makes any sense or not. I was initially thinking of using 3x3T drives each separate from one another. Then I slowly moved onto Raidz1 as I only read about one pool in the manual (might've said something about more at one point but didn't fully grasp what was being said) which everyone seemed at the time to consider a good idea. But today I'm seeing that Raidz1 seems to be a terrible idea ? Z1 Pool in Faulted state, any hope?
I don't have a good enough system (see signature) for Raidz2, so I started looking into multiple pools to prevent the whole thing collapsing on me once one drive fails. And I do seem to see a few snippets here and there indicating multiple pools; but nothing concrete. And it's all from links coming out of FreeNAS. No clue if it's a solaris thing or something else.
So my questions are:
1) Can one create multiple pools ? Is a root pool what we create before creating more pools or is that something entirely different ? I saw that term thrown around a lot but not sure if that pertains to anything here or not.
2) I want to set atime off. Should I do that in the vdev options instead of doing it in the datasets? Just have those inherit said attribute, right ?
3) What is parity ? I've tried looking for info on it but I just don't get it. To me it sounds like an extra bit to tell if a transfer is successful or not but the way it's talked about here it sounds like this extra bit would allow you to recover a whole hard drive crash as long as there wasn't any bad sectors on the parity drive.
4)In the n00b powerpoint presentation it says there aren't a lot of "recovery tools" because ZFS is enterprise-class software, and no enterprise would waste time with recovery tools. But from all I've read here, I've gathered that if one vdev dies, everything in a pool dies with it.
So say a Raidz1 x 100 pool (from the numbers I've been reading about from Oracle and various other sources) and the off chance that no one is able to get to it in time (if it happened overnight, during Christmas/New Year's, funeral, a batch of failing hard drives, insert an unexpected event here) the only thing that matters is that one drive in a vdev fails and then a second one in it fails. Now 300 drives are down ? Instead of just 2 or 3 ?
Now, I'm not thinking this would cause 300 drives to be taken out instead of just three, right ? But if they did have to be taken out that would be hell. Please tell me it won't destroy every single drive in the pool and it'll just make you have to re-write the data back. Although again, seems troublesome instead of swapping in two drives, buying two new drives and using them as back up and being done with it; now you have to transfer 300x1T of data. Or is the data retained on the drives till the dead vdev is recovered ?
I'm sure I've got something really mixed up here, so please clarify if you can! I know I'm a really confusing creature but if you can help, it would be much appreciated!
This is only relevant if multiple pools can be created:
5) There is some attribute called copy or copies that reproduces files written to disk n amount of times. Is it possible in FreeNAS (again kicking myself for reading other documentation too....) ?
6) Is it possible to install a game (or any program) via CIFS/NFS and will multicore be a major factor here ? Or Hz ? Or is it just the speed of the network (NIC/Switch/"router") ?
There are many more questions.... but these are the ones I would really love to have answered as soon as possible. ( http://wp.me/p3KhYb-2 my blog post with all my wonderings if you truly dare tackle the beast which is confusion)
Thanks for reading and hope you can make sense of this and help me out in some way!
So, I think I'm finally ready to try to set up my system, but I have a few questions. Please bear with me, I am after all a n00b lol.
I want to see if what I'm planning makes any sense or not. I was initially thinking of using 3x3T drives each separate from one another. Then I slowly moved onto Raidz1 as I only read about one pool in the manual (might've said something about more at one point but didn't fully grasp what was being said) which everyone seemed at the time to consider a good idea. But today I'm seeing that Raidz1 seems to be a terrible idea ? Z1 Pool in Faulted state, any hope?
I don't have a good enough system (see signature) for Raidz2, so I started looking into multiple pools to prevent the whole thing collapsing on me once one drive fails. And I do seem to see a few snippets here and there indicating multiple pools; but nothing concrete. And it's all from links coming out of FreeNAS. No clue if it's a solaris thing or something else.
So my questions are:
1) Can one create multiple pools ? Is a root pool what we create before creating more pools or is that something entirely different ? I saw that term thrown around a lot but not sure if that pertains to anything here or not.
2) I want to set atime off. Should I do that in the vdev options instead of doing it in the datasets? Just have those inherit said attribute, right ?
3) What is parity ? I've tried looking for info on it but I just don't get it. To me it sounds like an extra bit to tell if a transfer is successful or not but the way it's talked about here it sounds like this extra bit would allow you to recover a whole hard drive crash as long as there wasn't any bad sectors on the parity drive.
4)In the n00b powerpoint presentation it says there aren't a lot of "recovery tools" because ZFS is enterprise-class software, and no enterprise would waste time with recovery tools. But from all I've read here, I've gathered that if one vdev dies, everything in a pool dies with it.
So say a Raidz1 x 100 pool (from the numbers I've been reading about from Oracle and various other sources) and the off chance that no one is able to get to it in time (if it happened overnight, during Christmas/New Year's, funeral, a batch of failing hard drives, insert an unexpected event here) the only thing that matters is that one drive in a vdev fails and then a second one in it fails. Now 300 drives are down ? Instead of just 2 or 3 ?
Now, I'm not thinking this would cause 300 drives to be taken out instead of just three, right ? But if they did have to be taken out that would be hell. Please tell me it won't destroy every single drive in the pool and it'll just make you have to re-write the data back. Although again, seems troublesome instead of swapping in two drives, buying two new drives and using them as back up and being done with it; now you have to transfer 300x1T of data. Or is the data retained on the drives till the dead vdev is recovered ?
I'm sure I've got something really mixed up here, so please clarify if you can! I know I'm a really confusing creature but if you can help, it would be much appreciated!
This is only relevant if multiple pools can be created:
5) There is some attribute called copy or copies that reproduces files written to disk n amount of times. Is it possible in FreeNAS (again kicking myself for reading other documentation too....) ?
6) Is it possible to install a game (or any program) via CIFS/NFS and will multicore be a major factor here ? Or Hz ? Or is it just the speed of the network (NIC/Switch/"router") ?
There are many more questions.... but these are the ones I would really love to have answered as soon as possible. ( http://wp.me/p3KhYb-2 my blog post with all my wonderings if you truly dare tackle the beast which is confusion)
Thanks for reading and hope you can make sense of this and help me out in some way!