raid 5 with freenas

[Technomancer__]

i want to make a raid 5 array in freenas 11

i found this  video but its for the old interface and i cant find the option

 

@dalekphalmcan you help?

[Jarsky]

by RAID5 I assume you mean RAIDZ1. 

 

If its anything like Freenas 9.x then under 'Storage' there should be a Volume Manager. 

Open that and you should be able to select your drives, then select the layout RAIDZ1. Because you're making a new one it should automatically create your Dataset. 

[Technomancer__]

2 minutes ago, Jarsky said:

by RAID5 I assume you mean RAIDZ1. 

 

If its anything like Freenas 9.x then under 'Storage' there should be a Volume Manager. 

Open that and you should be able to select your drives, then select the layout RAIDZ1. Because you're making a new one it should automatically create your Dataset. 

thats zfs raid with one parity 

i dont wont zfs

[Jarsky]

1 minute ago, Ethocreeper said:

thats zfs raid with one parity 

i dont wont zfs

 

FreeNAS offers non-zfs parity again now? They dropped md years ago.....

[Jarsky]

http://www.freenas.org/faq/

 

Quote

7. Why does FreeNAS only support the ZFS filesystem?

FreeNAS is designed around the OpenZFS filesystem, which enables many of the advanced features of FreeNAS such as data integrity, early indication of faulty drives, and the ability to boot into a previous working copy of the operating system after a failed upgrade. Other filesystems, including UFS, NTFS, FAT, EXT2 and EXT3 are supported “read only”, in order to allow data migration onto a ZFS volume.

 

[Technomancer__]

1 minute ago, Jarsky said:

 

FreeNAS offers non-zfs parity again now? They dropped md years ago.....

realy did they drop raid support

[Jarsky]

2 minutes ago, Ethocreeper said:

realy did they drop raid support

They dropped it years ago - I believe after FreeNAS 8.X

[Technomancer__]

Just now, Jarsky said:

They dropped it years ago - I believe after FreeNAS 8.X

fuck.

thank you for helping

are there any alternatives?

[Jarsky]

1 minute ago, Ethocreeper said:

fuck.

thank you for helping

are there any alternatives?

 

why do you want to use md over zfs?

 

You could just use FreeBSD or Linux (Ubuntu/Debian/CentOS/etc...).

If you really want a NAS GUi then you could check out Openmediavault.

[Technomancer__]

1 minute ago, Jarsky said:

 

why do you want to use md over zfs?

 

You could just use FreeBSD or Linux (Ubuntu/Debian/CentOS/etc...).

If you really want a NAS GUi then you could check out Openmediavault.

i want raid 5 since i want to add more disks latter on

[Jarsky]

5 minutes ago, Ethocreeper said:

i want raid 5 since i want to add more disks latter on

 

Then check out OMV which uses Linux Software RAID (mdadm) https://www.openmediavault.org

 

[dalekphalm]

9 minutes ago, Ethocreeper said:

i want raid 5 since i want to add more disks latter on

I agree with @Jarsky - if you don't want or need ZFS, then the main advantage of FreeNAS is gone - sure it's still a decent NAS OS, but there are comparable alternatives, such as Open Media Vault.

3 minutes ago, Jarsky said:

 

Then check out OMV which uses Linux Software RAID (mdadm) https://www.openmediavault.org

 

 

[Technomancer__]

1 minute ago, dalekphalm said:

I agree with @Jarsky - if you don't want or need ZFS, then the main advantage of FreeNAS is gone - sure it's still a decent NAS OS, but there are comparable alternatives, such as Open Media Vault.

 

i want to start with 3 drives and gradualy add more 1 by 1

is there a way that i can do that on zfs while maintaning 1 parity drive beacouse ive read someware that you cant

[Technomancer__]

1 minute ago, Ethocreeper said:

i want to start with 3 drives and gradualy add more 1 by 1

is there a way that i can do that on zfs while maintaning 1 parity drive beacouse ive read someware that you cant

that i have to add more vdevs. which adds more redundancy

[dalekphalm]

9 minutes ago, Ethocreeper said:

i want to start with 3 drives and gradualy add more 1 by 1

is there a way that i can do that on zfs while maintaning 1 parity drive beacouse ive read someware that you cant

No - not in an easy way.

 

Parity RAID on ZFS does not allow you to grow the number of drives.

 

You either have to swap out drives one at a time with a larger one, rebuilding the array in between each swap (This will take a long time, no doubt). Or you can add a second complete array and stripe them together (This would be a ZFS equivalent of RAID 50).

 

Neither of those are ideal.

[Mikensan]

For a small sacrifice of space you can just do mirror vdevs, and add 2 at a time while maintaining single disk failover. Raid5 in most environments cannot be expanded with the exception of a few fancy raid cards. Honestly something like Windows Storage Spaces, FlexRAID or unRaid might be better suited for what you want to do.

[dalekphalm]

3 hours ago, Mikensan said:

For a small sacrifice of space you can just do mirror vdevs, and add 2 at a time while maintaining single disk failover. Raid5 in most environments cannot be expanded with the exception of a few fancy raid cards. Honestly something like Windows Storage Spaces, FlexRAID or unRaid might be better suited for what you want to do.

I can definitely recommend FlexRAID - though it's not free. I believe they often have the full license on sale for around $40-$50 or so.

 

FlexRAID is very flexible (duh lol) - you can do a single parity RAID array with however many drives you want (say, start with 4).

 

But the beauty is that you can add as many Parity Drives and/or additional Data Drives as you want, on the fly.

 

You can also combine multiple smaller drives into a larger virtual drive - this is useful if, for example:

You have 3x 3TB drives, 2x 500GB, 1x 2TB

 

You can combine the 2x 500GB and the 1x 2TB drive into a virtual 3TB drive, then use that virtual 3TB drive along side the other 3TB ones to form a 4x 3TB RAID5.

[Technomancer__]

3 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

I can definitely recommend FlexRAID - though it's not free. I believe they often have the full license on sale for around $40-$50 or so.

 

FlexRAID is very flexible (duh lol) - you can do a single parity RAID array with however many drives you want (say, start with 4).

 

But the beauty is that you can add as many Parity Drives and/or additional Data Drives as you want, on the fly.

 

You can also combine multiple smaller drives into a larger virtual drive - this is useful if, for example:

You have 3x 3TB drives, 2x 500GB, 1x 2TB

 

You can combine the 2x 500GB and the 1x 2TB drive into a virtual 3TB drive, then use that virtual 3TB drive along side the other 3TB ones to form a 4x 3TB RAID5.

I won't the performance tho

I already tested it

[Technomancer__]

8 hours ago, Mikensan said:

For a small sacrifice of space you can just do mirror vdevs, and add 2 at a time while maintaining single disk failover. Raid5 in most environments cannot be expanded with the exception of a few fancy raid cards. Honestly something like Windows Storage Spaces, FlexRAID or unRaid might be better suited for what you want to do.

How much sacrifice?

[Mikensan]

7 hours ago, Ethocreeper said:

How much sacrifice?

Just to note flexraid will fully saturate a gigabit network given new age disks can easily pump out 140-160mbps.  You can also throw an SSD at it for caching I believe. http://forum.flexraid.com/index.php/topic,3109.0.html

 

 

http://wintelguy.com/zfs-calc.pl

This calculator for me was pretty close, 14.1 out of 18 with 5x 4TB disks and it predicted 14.04. It's not a perfect calculator I'm told but it'll give you an idea.

I did 6x 4TB disks, and it was 10TB vs 17TB in RaindZ1 which is definitely more than I initially thought. I've seen in the past where RaidZ1 lost a lot of space, but I believe that might've been because of the wrong number of disks. Definitely the more you increase the number of disks the bigger the gap.

[bcguru9384]

On ‎8‎/‎17‎/‎2017 at 11:01 AM, Ethocreeper said:

i want to make a raid 5 array in freenas 11

i found this  video but its for the old interface and i cant find the option

 

@dalekphalmcan you help?

could you just do this use 5 hdd format 1 as boot drive and other 4 as extended

now create windowsfolder on 4 extended drives

use taskscheduler to

A. sync windows extended drives windows folder to c:\windows

B. tell *.* hdd to read from drive with least activity

C. take 2 extended hdd and make folders to be synced on other 2 drives

 

taskscheduler is a great tool if it ever gets used

[bcguru9384]

note on error of file in use create rule to sync/copy on next boot 

[Technomancer__]

@bcguru9384i want the performance of all drives + redundancy like raid 5

[dalekphalm]

On 8/18/2017 at 5:29 PM, Ethocreeper said:

I won't the performance tho

I already tested it

Indeed there is a performance difference compared to using hardware RAID5, but very few home based situations would warrant the increased bandwidth.

 

As noted, a single HDD as part of a FlexRAID array can still provide enough performance to saturate a Gigabit link.

 

Furthermore, if you have multiple clients all hitting the server at once, if the files requested by different clients are on different drives, you'll have double the potential performance (Assuming your network can handle said additional performance).

18 hours ago, Ethocreeper said:

@bcguru9384i want the performance of all drives + redundancy like raid 5

If you want that, you need to go Hardware RAID (although you need to ensure the particular card you buy has live expansion support), as it'll have the best overall performance (generally speaking). However Linux MD RAID will perform quite well too.

[Technomancer__]

@dalekphalm, @Mikensan and @Jarsky

i love openmediavault

2 problems

1. can i format my raid 5 as ntfs so windows pcs can read it
2. i am running it as a vm. can i make that computer that is running the vm to see it a local drive. and if i connect it as a network drive will it be bottlenecked by 1gbps to the server that runs the vm?

 

thanks for the help