FreeNas Help!

[TheBerryBeast]

Hello, i am going to build a home server, in which i will throw in all the hard drives i have got over the years and two new ones.
This is the list:
1 650 gb
3 1 TB
1 2 TB
2 3 TB
I want to combine all these drives into one drive and i also want some form of redundancy. Also i want to use zfs, so how much ram should i get. I have valuable information on this so can i be able to do this without formatting all the drives. Thank You.

 

[FireWire2]

ZFS typical needs 1GB per 1TB
So 8GB would be good

 

[TheBerryBeast]

Can i join all of these drives together in zfs and create some form of redundancy? Will i have to format all of the drives?

 

[popatim]

Yes, combine the `1 and 2 tb drives into a 3tb jbod raid and then raid1 it with the 3tb drive. the 650, having no matching drive, can be your boot drive and 'dont care if you loose it' storage/programs drive.

This gives you *some* redundancy but you still need to do backups for any data you cant afford to lose. I suggest 2 at minimum (1 onsite and 1 offsite). I personally use 3 backups (1 local onsite for quick access, 1 onsite in fireproof safe in basement, and 1 offsite)

Rememer its not IF a drive will fail, its WHEN. They all fail.
Also, if you use DVD for backups, try to get archival quality disks. They last alot longer. This is especially important if you do incremental backups instead of full backups.

 

[TheBerryBeast]

Thank You popatim for your time but i have multiple amounts of these drives with the number being next their size in my first post. What would you recommend now? Will i have to format all the drives?

 

[sub mesa]

You can make a RAID-Z with three devices: your two 3TB disks and one virtual disk with one 2TB drive and one 1TB drive in concatenating (sometimes referred to as 'JBOD' although this term is fairly ambiguous).

If you want redundancy, it is not easy to utilise all of your drives. But you can make a separate mirror of the last two remaining 1TB drives. Then you would have 1TB + 6TB = 7TB of usable storage which can survive at least one drive failure.

You want as much RAM as your system can hold. 32GiB RAM memory selling for under $150 this makes a pretty good deal. Better invest less on CPU but more on RAM. You only really need 8GiB. The general rule of thumb 'you need 1GB RAM per 1TB data' is inaccurate and false; even though generally correct. But this rule of thumb implies that ZFS needs more RAM as the drive capacity grows. That is incorrect; it needs more RAM to achieve higher speeds made possible by adding more disks. If you have a 128GB harddrive that can do 1TB/s - you would need much more memory the general rule of thumb would tell you. A fundamentally more accurate rule would be: you need 1GB of RAM per 100MB/s of throughput performance. But even this is not true, because at 4GiB RAM or lower - you will have poor out-of-the-box performance under BSD ZFS implementations due to ZFS prefetching being disabled.

 

[popatim]

Thank You popatim for your time but i have multiple amounts of these drives with the number being next their size in my first post. What would you recommend now? Will i have to format all the drives?

I completely missed that. LoL - Sorry.
It Looks like SubMesa took care of you there.

Yes you would need to format the drive to go to the ZFS format.

 

[TheBerryBeast]

Thank you very much guys, time to archive my data!

 

[TheBerryBeast]

Best answer selected by TheBerryBeast.

 

[FireWire2]

Can i join all of these drives together in zfs and create some form of redundancy? Will i have to format all of the drives?

Yes Using ZFS with RAID feature then you are OK... YOu can read some more in FreeNAS DOC about ZFS