nas build headaches

[JudeC]

Ok, Sunday night, spent the entire weekend saving, copying, moving media from one drive to another. Got my proliant n54l set up, and loaded freenas.

All was going well, until I tried to create a volume,

I have 3 drives installed, 2 x 3Tb and 1x 1.5Tb drives, with the os running off a flash memory stick.

Only no matter how I configure the volume, the max storage I get is 3.7Tb, doesn't matter if I raid stripe, mirror or 3. Which were the only options I could

Not really looking for redundancy as space is more important than backup

Using us, not ads as I only got 2gb memory

Any idea where I,m going wrong?

 

[Glordit]

Ok, Sunday night, spent the entire weekend saving, copying, moving media from one drive to another. Got my proliant n54l set up, and loaded freenas.

All was going well, until I tried to create a volume,

I have 3 drives installed, 2 x 3Tb and 1x 1.5Tb drives, with the os running off a flash memory stick.

Only no matter how I configure the volume, the max storage I get is 3.7Tb, doesn't matter if I raid stripe, mirror or 3. Which were the only options I could

Not really looking for redundancy as space is more important than backup

Using us, not ads as I only got 2gb memory

Any idea where I,m going wrong?

Raid 3 is going to see the the biggest drive as the smallest one. So the 2 3Tb's will be treated as 1.5Tb's, Can't do RAID 5 because you'll need 3+ drives with the same sizes. Will look into it more.

***edit
Don't stripe. 1 Drive failure = everything lost.
Mirrorring (RAID 3) will make the 3TB's the size of the 1.5's as they are going to store data on 2 and use the 3rd as a backup if one fails it can reconstruct the data.

A ZFS mirrored volume would create a volume of the three drives above limited to the space of the smallest drive. So, we'd get a 71.4GB volume that had a one-to-one copy on our 250GB drive and 160GB drive. In case one of the drives died, we'd still have a backup copy on the other. This would be a poor choice with the combination of drives we're using, since we'd lose so much available storage. Also not a wise choice with the availability of RAID-Z.

A striped volume creates a volume which has an available size of all disks combined. So in this case we'd get 442.5GB of storage available, with no redundancy. Not the best setup for redundancy, because if a drive fails, your volume goes offline and you'll have possible data loss. Always remember: it's never a question of if a hard drive will fail, but when. This is, however, the best setup for providing the maximum amount of storage space.

A RAID-Z1 Volume, in the most basic of terms, is an advanced mirror. Yours truly could write a whitepaper on RAID-Z, but it's really beyond the scope of this how-to. However, this is the best option if you've got at least three drives of the same size.

According to that you somewhat have your answer I believe? I will continue to look into it though but I already see it as stated above. RAID is either for redundancy or speed, there is always going to be a catch with it.

Personally I would just get another 3TB and make it RAID 5. You could always add another in the future.

 

[JudeC]

thanks, the weird thing is when I created a striped volume, it was still not the sum of all ""A striped volume creates a volume which has an available size of all disks combined"" it still came in at 4 tb, but yes I think that would be stupid to lose everything, a fourth drive at this point is not going to happen, due to cash constraints,

so the plan is to create a volume within each drive and have 3 different volumes, 2 will be used for my media, and 1 for backups from all the pc's in the house