Nitricspace

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Looks like I made a mistake with the PERC H700, I understood it could be flashed or crossflashed to act in JBOD mode but I was wrong. I now have a PERC 6i that I can't use and a H700 that I can only use in hardware RAID (which I want to avoid as I'm using FreeNAS). Currently, my solution is to run each drive in a hardware RAID 0 and then pass those RAIDs to FreeNAS to run them RAIDz1. I understand this is definitely not a recommended usecase, but just how much risk is there of data loss? If it's a serious reliability issue then I'll look into selling both cards and buying a SAS HBA card instead. Please let me know what you think of the solution, and how much risk is involved.

Thanks @paddy-stone and @Olaf6541, really appreciate the input. My R710 arrived today and I am going to outfit it with 3 4TB Ironwolf drives in RAIDZ1 with an external HDD for essential file backups. I'm now looking at exactly what RAID card I should get that can be run in JBOD mode so I can let ZFS handle RAID. I'm thinking of buying a PERC H700 kit with battery and replacement cables instead of the 1015 because I've seen people have success using it in this exact server. However, I'm a bit confused at why all the different eBay listings for a H700 kit are all vastly different prices. I see some have 512MB of cache and some have 1GB, but I've seen refurbished cards listed anywhere from £20 to £160. Are all H700 RAID cards not the same? Do I need to be really careful with buying the correct card for my R710 or should any H700 work? Considering my final plan is to have two RAIDz1 arrays each with 3 4TB drives, will the H700 work for this usecase? I'm planning on buying this simply because it's one of the cheapest listings, although I'm not sure if it will work since other identical-looking H700s seem to go for a lot more. Thanks so much for the help so far

@Olaf6541 see, I was wondering if it was worth the extra cost for parity disks considering I'm using NAS certified drives. @paddy-stone Do you think it would be worth it spending the money that would have been spent on parity on a set of backup drives or a seperate server and running the main server with no parity? Ideally I'd like to have both but I do see that it could be more likely for something to cause all of the drives to be lost like a house fire or PSU issue than a single drive to fail and wipe the data. Regarding the servers, any thoughts on the actual hardware? If the cheaper one is as good value as it seems I could spend some of the difference on a more recent processor. Although if there are any alternative suggestions for hardware that would be great. I'm guessing freenas has features that automate backups over the local network as well as to offsite servers?

I understand, I didn't mean I was going to expand the RaidZ1 array but rather add an entirely new RaidZ1 array with identical drives. This would allow me to expand the storage available on my freenas server without having to transfer or backup my data right?

Hey there, I'm new to using FreeNAS so bear with me if I'm making common mistakes that I haven't found in my research so far. I'm looking to set up a small home NAS setup using 4TB WD reds because of their value over 2 or 3TB variants. I'm planing to start with using 3 drives in RaidZ1, I'm aware that using this configuration is frowned upon as there is only one parity disk but the setup is just for home use and I want as much capacity for the money as possible, although it would suck to lose photos or documents stored on the machine. When I have the requirements and the budget I'll add another 3 drives to expand the pool. I'm currently looking at two different options from Bargain Hardware on Ebay, an R710 with a L5630 or an EMC Avamar with dual E5-2609s, the first of which I've been told is fairly good value. I'd love some input on these options or recommendations if possible. I'm aware the specific raid cards may not be able to be used as a standard SATA controller to allow software RAID through ZFS, so I'm planning to buy an M1015 to install instead. Any help or feedback on these choices would be greatly appreciated!

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