What is best raid for me (FREENAS)

[desertcomputer]

I have setup freenas and i was wondering what raid option should i implement with 2TB reds and another one coming next month. I know they is option for adding drive to drive pool but what would suit me for current setup and also accommodate future drives. Planing to use this as backup for important family photos/work/back of files and as Plex Server and also FTP for small files (.doc/.pdf etc) 

[LawrenceBarnes2013]

Exactly how many drives you got now ??

Edited February 3, 2016 by LawrenceBarnes2013

[desertcomputer]

10 minutes ago, LawrenceBarnes2013 said:

Exactly how many drives you got now ??

2 at the moment. 

 

 

[KuJoe]

The only RAID option for you is 0 (stripped) or 1 (mirror). Neither of which allow you to add more drives later without wiping the array and starting clean.

[LawrenceBarnes2013]

4 minutes ago, MrUnknownEMC said:

2 at the moment. 

 

 

with 2 drives you should use raid 1 for redundancy, because i wanted to suggest raid10 witch is just as safe but much faster but you need at least 4 drives 

[desertcomputer]

Just now, LawrenceBarnes2013 said:

with 2 drives you should use raid 1 for redundancy, because i wanted to suggest rai10 witch is just as safe but much faster but you need at least 4 drives 

Oh ok ... is ZFS a good option? or not.

 

 

Current have Fx6300 as CPU for my ghetto nas, should i spend money to get new motherboard/cpu (A i3) or get two additional drives. 

[desertcomputer]

7 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

The only RAID option for you is 0 (stripped) or 1 (mirror). Neither of which allow you to add more drives later without wiping the array and starting clean.

What about ZFS? 

[LawrenceBarnes2013]

8 minutes ago, MrUnknownEMC said:

Oh ok ... is ZFS a good option? or not.

 

 

Current have Fx6300 as CPU for my ghetto nas, should i spend money to get new motherboard/cpu (A i3) or get two additional drives. 

8 minutes ago, MrUnknownEMC said:

 

 

not gonna lie to you mate, i've only had real experience and a really good one with Raid, after all ZFS is not as globally used as Raid 

Get two more drives to set up Raid 10 and call it a day, The 6300 is just fine, compared to an i3 

 

[desertcomputer]

Just now, LawrenceBarnes2013 said:

 

not gonna lie to you mate, i've only had real experience and a really good one with Raid, after all ZFS is not as globally used as Raid 

 

Is it possible to add additional drives without losing my data? I dont't think im able copy the data off to another drive. 

[LawrenceBarnes2013]

1 minute ago, MrUnknownEMC said:

Is it possible to add additional drives without losing my data? I dont't think im able copy the data off to another drive. 

yeah it is

[alpenwasser]

@MrUnknownEMC 

What you can do after creation:

• Add more drives to a mirror,
• remove drives from a mirror,
• add more vdevs to a pool.

What you cannot do after creation:

• Add more drives to a RAIDZ{1,2,3} vdev,
• remove drives from a RAIDZ vdev,
• remove a vdev from a pool

So, if you create a mirror now (which is what I'd recommend with two drives), you could add more drives to that mirror (which won't give you any extra space, but more protection, but personally I don't think it makes that much sense for a home server/NAS). The way you will get more space in your pool though is by adding more vdevs. So you can add another mirror, or a RAIDZ vdev.

Example:

 

Create pool consisting of a single mirror:

# zpool create scratch -m /root/zfs-sandbox/scratch mirror /root/zfs-sandbox/0.img /root/zfs-sandbox/1.img
# zpool status scratch
  pool: scratch
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:

        NAME                         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        scratch                      ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0                   ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/0.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/1.img  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

Add another mirror:

#zpool add scratch mirror /root/zfs-sandbox/2.img /root/zfs-sandbox/3.img 

#  zpool status scratch 

  pool: scratch
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:

        NAME                         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        scratch                      ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0                   ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/0.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/1.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-1                   ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/2.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/3.img  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

And, if you wanted to, you could also add a RAIDZ. Note however that you can get weird performance behavior if you mix different types of vdevs in your pool (mirrors and RAIDZ, or different kinds or RAIDZ). Plus, having different kinds of vdevs also means that you don't get the same level of protection on all of them, which may or may not be an issue to you. Indeed, ZFS will complain at first if you try to do this:

# zpool add scratch raidz2 /root/zfs-sandbox/4.img /root/zfs-sandbox/5.img /root/zfs-sandbox/6.img /root/zfs-sandbox/7.img /root/zfs-sandbox/8.img

invalid vdev specification
use '-f' to override the following errors:
mismatched replication level: pool uses mirror and new vdev is raidz

So, let's use the force then:

# zpool add -f scratch raidz2 /root/zfs-sandbox/4.img /root/zfs-sandbox/5.img /root/zfs-sandbox/6.img /root/zfs-sandbox/7.img /root/zfs-sandbox/8.img
# zpool status scratch

  pool: scratch
 state: ONLINE
  scan: none requested
config:

        NAME                         STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        scratch                      ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-0                   ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/0.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/1.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-1                   ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/2.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/3.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
          raidz2-2                   ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/4.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/5.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/6.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/7.img  ONLINE       0     0     0
            /root/zfs-sandbox/8.img  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

 

Whatever you end up doing, the cardinal rule in ZFS is this:

You must never, ever have a vdev failure. If you do, your pool is dead and your data is gone.

[desertcomputer]

@alpenwasser

 

Thank for this detailed guide and explanation would be much easier to run raid 1 for my first batch of 2TB drives and than later add 2 more drives but to a different pool. The only down side to that is "I need to create two FTP server if i want to access them? or can i some how link them together.  

[alpenwasser]

@MrUnknownEMC 

Not sure about the FTP, I don't really know FreeNAS that well since I run ZFS on Linux, sorry.

[Mikensan]

FTP can point to multiple folders/datasets across different pools and present the user with a list of said folders.

If you're OK with mirrors you can just setup more mirrors and stripe them. 

Given this is just for backups and small ftp files - all data that resides on it should also exist in the source (IE your personal computer), so when your new drives arrive you can just rebuild the array and put all the data back on again.

[desertcomputer]

On 2/3/2016 at 0:41 AM, alpenwasser said:

@MrUnknownEMC 

Not sure about the FTP, I don't really know FreeNAS that well since I run ZFS on Linux, sorry.

Is there a good guide/video showing how to setup a permission due the fact i can't seem to access/write permission using window cifs share as for some reason i only can get working when it set to guest mode in cifs and also allow read/write in dataset permission "other". 

[alpenwasser]

4 hours ago, MrUnknownEMC said:

Is there a good guide/video showing how to setup a permission due the fact i can't seem to access/write permission using window cifs share as for some reason i only can get working when it set to guest mode in cifs and also allow read/write in dataset permission "other". 

Hard to say what's going to be actually useful for you here due to my lack of hands-on experience with FreeNAS, but have you had a look at this one?

 

 

This is the official vid for 9.3 from the FreeNAS channel. But honestly, for Windows share troubleshooting, I'm really the wrong guy to talk to, I have done very little Windows-ing in the past few years.