HDD Setup

[noobftw]

Hi, I have 8x14TB drives, they get about 210MB/s R/W. What setup should I be going with if I am looking for maximum speed?

I will be running TrueNas, thanks in advance.

[mahyar]

raid 0

[noobftw]

Other than RAID 0 (Stripe), what would be the next best method?

[Moonzy]

Just now, noobftw said:

Other than RAID 0 (Stripe), what would be the next best method?

what are you looking for, redundancy?

[noobftw]

Just now, Moonzy said:

what are you looking for, redundancy?

My main goal is speed, but i would like a little redundancy. Obviously, a RAID 0 array would be the best as Mahyar said. But 8 drives in RAID 0 seems a little crazy to me. 

[Moonzy]

2 minutes ago, noobftw said:

My main goal is speed, but i would like a little redundancy. Obviously, a RAID 0 array would be the best as Mahyar said. But 8 drives in RAID 0 seems a little crazy to me. 

could try raid 5 or 6 then, but it's compute heavy so you need a good cpu/dedicated card to get decent speed

 

but if you need speed, why not use a fast NVME as cache? albeit some files may be slow, but commonly used files will be cached

[noobftw]

1 hour ago, Moonzy said:

could try raid 5 or 6 then, but it's compute heavy so you need a good cpu/dedicated card to get decent speed

 

but if you need speed, why not use a fast NVME as cache? albeit some files may be slow, but commonly used files will be cached

I won't have any commonly used files, so that might be pointless in my scenario. Whats RAID 5-6 in ZFS? 

[Moonzy]

3 minutes ago, noobftw said:

Whats RAID 5-6 in ZFS? 

i dont know, sorry

im not too into storage solutions

perhaps someone else on the forum can assist you.

[AbsoluteFool]

7 hours ago, noobftw said:

I won't have any commonly used files, so that might be pointless in my scenario. Whats RAID 5-6 in ZFS? 

RAIDZ-1 would be RAID5. Wouldn't trueNAS or the software you are using tell you this? That you can lose Xdrives before data is lost?

[Jarsky]

14 hours ago, noobftw said:

My main goal is speed, but i would like a little redundancy. Obviously, a RAID 0 array would be the best as Mahyar said. But 8 drives in RAID 0 seems a little crazy to me. 

So you have 10gbit network? Otherwise speed across the disks is largely irrelevant. An individual HDD can saturate a 1gbit network twice over from a single disk. 

 

If you want some redundancy and are using TrueNAS Core, then you're after either 1-disk or 2-disk parity. 

So you either want to create a

 

RAIDZ-1 (The 8x 14TB disks with 1 disk capacity dedicated to parity) = 98TB RAW

RAIDZ-2 (The 8x 14TB disks with 2 disk capacity dedicated to parity) = 84TB RAW

ZPOOL with 2x RAIDZ-1 VDEV's (2 x VDEV's with 4 x 14TB disks, each vdev with 1 disk parity) = 84TB RAW

 

1 disk parity is faster than 2 disk parity (which is faster again than 3 disk parity), due to only having to perform a single calculation. So your faster are either of the RAIDZ-1's. 

 

You won't notice any speed difference though if you only have a gigabit network.

That many spindles, i've easily been able to reach sustained speeds of 600MB/s+....and burst speeds of up to 1.4GB/s without the use of a cache drive. 

 

If you do have 10gbit you may want to consider a dedicated SSD/NVMe for the ZIL/SLOG device for best write performance. 

Even better would be an Optane drive for its low queue depth support.  

 

 

[noobftw]

12 hours ago, Jarsky said:

So you have 10gbit network? Otherwise speed across the disks is largely irrelevant. An individual HDD can saturate a 1gbit network twice over from a single disk. 

 

If you want some redundancy and are using TrueNAS Core, then you're after either 1-disk or 2-disk parity. 

So you either want to create a

 

RAIDZ-1 (The 8x 14TB disks with 1 disk capacity dedicated to parity) = 98TB RAW

RAIDZ-2 (The 8x 14TB disks with 2 disk capacity dedicated to parity) = 84TB RAW

ZPOOL with 2x RAIDZ-1 VDEV's (2 x VDEV's with 4 x 14TB disks, each vdev with 1 disk parity) = 84TB RAW

 

1 disk parity is faster than 2 disk parity (which is faster again than 3 disk parity), due to only having to perform a single calculation. So your faster are either of the RAIDZ-1's. 

 

You won't notice any speed difference though if you only have a gigabit network.

That many spindles, i've easily been able to reach sustained speeds of 600MB/s+....and burst speeds of up to 1.4GB/s without the use of a cache drive. 

 

If you do have 10gbit you may want to consider a dedicated SSD/NVMe for the ZIL/SLOG device for best write performance. 

Even better would be an Optane drive for its low queue depth support.  

 

Yes i have a 10GB network. If i were just doing backups, no same files continuously accessed, then i'm not sure a ZIL/SLOG would be beneficial, am i right there?. Guess i need to go full SSD, but that is far too costly atm. 

 

[Jarsky]

7 hours ago, noobftw said:

Yes i have a 10GB network. If i were just doing backups, no same files continuously accessed, then i'm not sure a ZIL/SLOG would be beneficial, am i right there?. Guess i need to go full SSD, but that is far too costly atm. 

 

I think you're confusing the ZIL & SLOG with L2ARC. L2ARC is your cache...so where the data gets written while in flight, and where frequently accessed files can be cached to. 

The ZIL/SLOG is essentially a transactional log of inflight data while its in memory. By default this is part of your zpool, but you can move it to a dedicated device which can be beneficial with larger setups with heavy write. Optane drives especially are good for this not only for low queue depth but because it can be hard to tell what SSD's to use as many of them implement DRAM caching which is volatile (in the event of writes during unexpected power loss). You'll probably be just fine going with the default configuration, it was just an additional thought.