home server storage. Home File Server RAID Config?

[AndrewMKlasen]

Hello, I am making a home file server for any imporant files plus my footage for my YouTube videos, I am getting 16 8TB IronWolf NAS drives in my system, my motherboard only has 6 6GBp/s Sata 3.0 Ports.I want to use FreeNAS with it's RAID configuration. I also hope to be able to access this from outside my network is its at all possible with FreeNAS! All help is appriciated!

Edited October 23, 2020 by AndrewMKlasen

[mahyar]

how much storage do you need?

and i suggest getting a raid card

[Master Disaster]

6 minutes ago, AndrewMKlasen said:

Hello, I am making a home file server for any imporant files plus my footage for my YouTube videos, I am getting 16 8TB IronWolf NAS drives in my system, my motherboard only has 6 6GBp/s Sata 3.0 Ports. I am either thinking of using windows 10 Pro and making a FTP Server and extending the drive partitions, or should I use FreeNAS with it's RAID configuration. I also hope to be able to access this from outside my network is its at all possible with FreeNAS! All help is appriciated!

I'm a little confused. If your board only has 6 SATA ports how are you going to connect 16 drives to it?

 

As for external access, you can use WebDAV for remote access or just set up a VPN server, dial in and access the files as if they are local (so standard SMB).

 

Please avoid FTP, these days its about as secure as a blind security guard. At least go with SFTP but honestly, WebDAV is the better choice.

[mahyar]

how much storage do you need?

and i suggest getting a raid card

[AndrewMKlasen]

I am looking for a RAID card, Any Suggestions for a good RAID card? and I'll probably start with 2 8TB now.

[mahyar]

1 minute ago, AndrewMKlasen said:

I am looking for a RAID card, Any Suggestions for a good RAID card? and I'll probably start with 2 8TB now.

what kind of raid and how much raw storage do you need?

[LIGISTX]

2 minutes ago, AndrewMKlasen said:

I am looking for a RAID card, Any Suggestions for a good RAID card? and I'll probably start with 2 8TB now.

If you want to go Freenas, DONT GET A RAID CARD. ZFS needs bare metal access to the drives, RAID cards interfere with this. You want to get specific cards that can or already have been flashed to IT mode so they are transparent, ZFS will handle the RAID on its own. I would highly advise checking out the freenas forums for more info. There is a lot to learn here.... 

 

I run freenas and recommend it, but it takes some learning and thought

[AndrewMKlasen]

I'm thinking a RAID 10 and I want to future proof myself so about 100TB. if I can get access outside my netork I'm planning on giving family and some friends some space hence why I said 100TB, If it's just me 30TB ish

[AndrewMKlasen]

2 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

If you want to go Freenas, DONT GET A RAID CARD. ZFS needs bare metal access to the drives, RAID cards interfere with this. You want to get specific cards that can or already have been flashed to IT mode so they are transparent, ZFS will handle the RAID on its own. I would highly advise checking out the freenas forums for more info. There is a lot to learn here.... 

 

I run freenas and recommend it, but it takes some learning and thought

Thanks for the help! But can I get Sata expansion cards for it to add more space?

[mahyar]

1 minute ago, AndrewMKlasen said:

I'm thinking a RAID 10 and I want to future proof myself so about 100TB. if I can get access outside my netork I'm planning on giving family and some friends some space hence why I said 100TB, If it's just me 30TB ish

so zfs will do just add sata expansion card if you want to use all drives 

[AndrewMKlasen]

Awesome! thank you everyone for the help!

[LIGISTX]

1 minute ago, AndrewMKlasen said:

Thanks for the help! But can I get Sata expansion cards for it to add more space?

“Yes” you can. But don’t. They are not very reliable. A SAS card that can be flashed to IT mode can be had for under 100 bucks, and a SAS expander will be about the same. A single SAS port can break out to 4 SATA, and this is the way you want to go. The little SATA cards are garbage, SAS cards are enterprise grade.

 

All of this will be on the freenas forums, just takes reading and research   

[LIGISTX]

5 minutes ago, AndrewMKlasen said:

I'm thinking a RAID 10 and I want to future proof myself so about 100TB. if I can get access outside my netork I'm planning on giving family and some friends some space hence why I said 100TB, If it's just me 30TB ish

Why 10? 10 is pretty uncommon, and for normal gigabit networking pretty pointless. A RAID Z2 (RAID6) can easily saturate gigabit, and has “enough” redundancy. Can always step up to Z3 if you want more redundancy. 

[AndrewMKlasen]

1 minute ago, LIGISTX said:

Why 10? 10 is pretty uncommon, and for normal gigabit networking pretty pointless. A RAID Z2 (RAID6) can easily saturate gigabit, and has “enough” redundancy. Can always step up to Z3 if you want more redundancy. 

I heard RAID 5 wasn't good and my networking teacher reccomened me RAID 10.

2 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

“Yes” you can. But don’t. They are not very reliable. A SAS card that can be flashed to IT mode can be had for under 100 bucks, and a SAS expander will be about the same. A single SAS port can break out to 4 SATA, and this is the way you want to go. The little SATA cards are garbage, SAS cards are enterprise grade.

 

All of this will be on the freenas forums, just takes reading and research   

Do you have a reccomended SAS add-on card?

[mahyar]

7 minutes ago, LIGISTX said:

Why 10? 10 is pretty uncommon, and for normal gigabit networking pretty pointless. A RAID Z2 (RAID6) can easily saturate gigabit, and has “enough” redundancy. Can always step up to Z3 if you want more redundancy. 

imo raid 10 is more reliable idk about raid 6 so will make sense for him to go raid 10

Edited October 23, 2020 by mahyar

[LIGISTX]

Just now, AndrewMKlasen said:

Do you have a reccomended SAS add-on card?

There are a few options. Off hand I don’t remember them. Look in my sig, I have a Dell H310 and some SAS expander. But there are others - the freenas forums will have them all detailed.

 

Before you buy anything, spend about a week reading threads and posts on the freenas forums. Learn all the terminology and understand what your about to invest money in. It’s not complicated, but there is a lot of info. Much more then I can possibly relay in a few posts...

[LIGISTX]

1 minute ago, mahyar said:

imo raid is more reliable idk about raid 6 so will make sense for him to go raid 10

ZFS is RAID.... it’s software raid. ZFS is EXTREMELY reliable. And it’s hardware agnostic making it more reliable upon hardware failure. 

[mahyar]

1 minute ago, LIGISTX said:

ZFS is RAID.... it’s software raid. ZFS is EXTREMELY reliable. And it’s hardware agnostic making it more reliable upon hardware failure. 

typo meant raid 10

[LIGISTX]

3 minutes ago, mahyar said:

typo meant raid 10

I mean, RAID 10 is full redundancy. But, it’s really meant for speed. If you run Z3 and have more then 3 drives die at the same time in a normally sized vdev..... you probably have much larger problems. Z3 provides 3 drives worth of redundancy.  Z2 is 2 drives, and that’s what I run across a 10 drive vdev. 

[mahyar]

Just now, LIGISTX said:

I mean, RAID 10 is full redundancy. But, it’s really meant for speed. If you run Z3 and have more then 3 drives die at the same time in a normally sized vdev..... you probably have much larger problems. Z3 provides 3 drives worth of redundancy.  Z2 is 2 drives, and that’s what I run across a 10 drive vdev. 

well more drives in raid 10 more redundancy and it has good speeds albeit with a high price

[LIGISTX]

56 minutes ago, mahyar said:

well more drives in raid 10 more redundancy and it has good speeds albeit with a high price

That is true, but but unless you know you need RAID 10, you probably don’t. It does offer higher redundancy, but rules number 1-3 of RAID is RAID is not a backup. So if your data matters enough for that level of redundancy, you better have an offsite or cloud backup anyways. And to that affect, if you run Z3 and actually lost your data, your going to have your backup option there as your security net.

 

The speed benefits or 10 are not going to be noticed on a gigabit network at all. Even 2.5 gb that wouldn’t be worth while. If you were running iscsi over 10gb or virtual connections, sure. But for OP’s use case I would recommend against it in favor of more storage with Z2 or Z3. 

[Jarsky]

For 16 x 8TB disks, personally I would go with TrueNAS Core (FreeNAS) and i'd consider 2 x RAIDZ2's in a single zpool. Better IOPS and better redundancy than just 1 large pool. 

For connecting the drives, use HBA cards. You could get an LSI 9201-16i (or a 9305-16i for a SAS3 controller) to connect them all to a single card.