Raid question from a bit of a noobie

[Chalkie]

Hi there,

 

TLDR: can i use 2 x 4TB 3.5" and 2 x 4TB 2.5" from the same company (seagate barracuda compute drives) with 1 drive available for redundancy and 3 drives in use for a combined 12TB available space in FreeNas and does plex support freenas on the box its self? 

 

Long Story: I recently brought a Ryzen 5 3600 with 16GB ram and a 500GB M.2 SSD (not NVME), along with a 2TB HDD because my old computer (I7-2600k, 16gb ram ect ect) died, well my parents have also brought me a new motherboard bundle because they didn't know I had upgraded and they don't want to return it, its actually a newer bundle (AMD Ryzen 7 5800X,ASUS TUF GAMING X570-PLUS (WI-FI), 32gb ram). 

Thats the back story, so I have now this Ryzen 5 3600 system on a MATX board, I have ordered myself a MATX case and I want to turn it into a NAS system with freenas. The case has space for 2 x 3.5" drives and 2 x 2.5" drives.

I would like to setup 4 x 4TB Drives in the system but with 2 of each size, and set them up in a raid with 12TB available and 4TB for redundancy, is that possible and will the difference in physical size cause an issue? They are all Seagate Barracuda Compute drives. 

I will mainly be using it as a plex box and backup for my main computer files like photos and documents, will i be able to use a plex setup within freenas?

Thanks for your help
 

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Chalkie said:

can i use 2 x 4TB 3.5" and 2 x 4TB 2.5" from the same company (seagate barracuda compute drives) with 1 drive available for redundancy and 3 drives in use for a combined 12TB available space in FreeNas

Yes, you'll have to do a single RAIDZ1 vdev and the disks will have slightly different performance profiles but it'll been fine.

[Electronics Wizardy]

13 hours ago, leadeater said:

Yes, you'll have to do a single RAIDZ1 vdev and the disks will have slightly different performance profiles but it'll been fine.

One thing to note is those 4tb 2.5in drives are almost certantly smr drives, and will have very poor performance in some raid operations like raid rebuilds. Things like a raid rebuild might take over a week with this setup. 

 

But yea zfs(or any other software raid) doesn't care about the drive model + form factor. It will work.

[leadeater]

57 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

One thing to note is those 4tb 2.5in drives are almost certantly smr drives

True forgot about that, hmm maybe best not to use them together with the 3.5" ones then.