ZFS build questions. How to best use my current drives?

[Alfa147x]

Hey folks!

Starting to gather parts to consolidate my 2 ReadyNAS devices to FreeNAS running ZFS. I have the following:

• Drives
  
  • 3x 3TB Western Digital Red
    
  • 5x 1TB Western Digital Red
• Other stuff:
  
  • Dell Perc H310 / LSI SAS 2008
  • Intel Xeon X5650
  • Supermicro X8ST3-F
    
  • 48GB of ECC memory

I was dead set on using ZFS but I'm open to suggestions. I'm looking to be able to have 1 drive fail and still having access to my data. I would also like to be able to expand the clusters as needed with little manual work.The reason I have an odd number of drives is so I have a cold spare handy if a drive dies.

• How can I best use all of my current drives? They don't all need to be aggregated together. So I'm fine with a cluster of 1tb drives and a cluster of 3tb drives.
  
• How difficult is expansion and what is the process like?
• Any suggestions? I'm coming from the ReadyNAS world and I'm trying to learn as I go.

Thanks for the help!
Alfa

 

[whitey]

If it were me to get off the ground I'd setup a raidz w/ the 3x 3Tb disks for capacity pool and a stripped mirror (IE two mirror sets of the 1 TB and stripe across vdevs) for performance tier. May want to think about some good ssd's for ZIL/potentially L2ARC cache.

 

[Alfa147x]

If it were me to get off the ground I'd setup a raidz w/ the 3x 3Tb disks for capacity pool and a stripped mirror (IE two mirror sets of the 1 TB and stripe across vdevs) for performance tier. May want to think about some good ssd's for ZIL/potentially L2ARC cache.

Just to be clear I would have 2 pools of storage with that setup? Do you think a cheap $100 - $150 SSD would help even with 48GB of memory? I don't want to spend very much more on this build at the moment.

 

[whitey]

A zil would be worth it, a s3700 100gb should suffice at that pricepoint, I've seen many of those go recently for $60-100. I'd use it on the stripped mirror pool if you decide to take that route.

 

[neo]

The only thing I do not like is the 100 Gb S3700 only does 200MB/s for sequential writes.

ARK | Intel® SSD DC S3700 Series (100GB, 2.5in SATA 6Gb/s, 25nm, MLC)

 

[whitey]

Yep, if you can afford the 200gb model and up they get abt double that, forget exact numbers. I 'had' 4 200gb s3700s FS a couple weeks back but garnered lil interest and decided to keep those now so keep your eyes open...time to go hunting

 

[Alfa147x]

Thanks folks. I have a few other things allocated for my fun budget so if I hold off on the SSD for L2ARC can I slap one on later?

Also I have a 120GB Corsair Force 3 drive and a 120GB Corsair Force GT drive, can L2ARC span multiple drives?

I'm not looking to employ the use of ZIL since AFS rarely uses synchronous writes.

 

[dswartz]

Sure, you can add SSDs for l2arc at any time (including additional ones.) You can remove them too, if you wanted to upgrade...