Preffered setup

[razvanc.mobile]

Hello everyone,

I need to rebuild my current freenas server.
Currently it's a 12 x 1 TB raidz1 zpool, and i will replace all the drives.
I have 8 x 2 TB drives available, and i was wondering which setup would be best?
make a raidz2 out of all 8 drives, or making two separate radiz1 vdevs?

The server will be used for storing backups produced by veeam or uploaded via ftp.

The chassis i'll be using has 12 x 3.5 slots, so i'm also thinking about expanding in the future, by adding 4 more drives, which i'd love to put in the same zpool if possible, expanding the space available.

 

[nephri]

i'm not yet really confident with zfs and freenas (i'm building my first nas).
but what i understood :
- a zpool built on 2 vdevs will give you more IOPS that with only 1 vdev
- for expanding, you will be able to create a new vdev with new disks and set it to you pool. But i will not be able to enlarge the existing vdevs
- don't do too big vdev (in term of # disks) because when a disk will fails, the delay for rebuilding it will be longer.

So your migration would be easier if you have 12x 2Tb because you can change one by one each disk (and wait the rebuild).

If you have less disks, you will not be able to do that, because as long as you have a smaller disk on a vdev, the space of others disks can't be used. In addition, you can't remove a disk from a vdev. So you will have to perform a raw copy of your old zpool to the new one and have all disks online for this migration.

I let ZFS/FreeNas expert to validate or reject what i'm saying ^^

 

[alex1002]

What you using for your veeam proxies? Why not just make new backups instead of migrating data over

 

[razvanc.mobile]

What you using for your veeam proxies? Why not just make new backups instead of migrating data over

I'm not migrating the data, i'm gonna rebuild the pool with new drives.
Basically my main question is should i configure a single 8 x 2TB raidz2 vdev, or two 4 x 2TB raidz1 vdevs?

 

[nephri]

for a backup storage only, i would go for 8x RaidZ2.

 

[cperalt1]

If you ever plan on adding another 4 drives to your setup I recommend two vdevs so that your vdevs are the same size disk wise 4+4+4(future). This is given that you have a 12 bay system if I understood correctly. Also the cost of upgrading in the future will be lower if you move to larger disks.

 

[razvanc.mobile]

i will go for 2vdevs of 4x2tb raidz1 the, since it seems easier to upgrade, and also rebuild time is lower.

do you guys know if i can save the current configuration, destroy the current zpool (12x1tb raidz1), build the new zpool with the new drives, then restore the configuration? i'm interested in not having to redefine mount points, iscsi targets, ftp jails etc, that i have already set up.