Related Forum Post forums.lawrencesystems.com/t/freenas-zfs-pools-raidz-raidz2-raidz3-capacity-integrity-and-performance/3569

The lack of a one size fits all approach is a huge benefit to ZFS. Since huge amounts of storage are not crucial to me I run mirrors. Since I read much more than I write the speed boost on that end is nice.

But I want ALL the Capacities, and ALL the Integrities, and ALL the Perforamcies!! 😂

Excellent video! I prefer watching your videos versus reading articles so THANK YOU for sharing your knowledge with us!

This has been a very good topic. I am now getting into major virtualization, fault tolerance, and backups. I have multiple servers with VMs running on Proxmox and setup replication and high availability on ZFS storage. I'm trying to find the absolute best solution and fully understanding the ZFS options prior to migrating completely away from VMware.

TLDW (to long didn't watch). I ended up reading the articles linked to in the video description. Very helpful.

Thanks mate. Good intro, good links to follow up. Cheers.

Just in time! Doing the first FreeNAS install as soon as the SATA cables arrive in about 2 hours. :)

Great review video!

Love zfs

Definitely exactly what I needed, and at the exact right time. KZfaq is skynet?!!? 🤔

Solid. 'it depends' -- literally 1000 reddit questions just answered.

I have a question. I currently had a qnap ts-809 that got full and unmounted the pool and will not do anything other than format ( with loss of all my photos/music. So I´m thinking of building a new backup server to protect all data using freenas. I have 8x 3 Tb disks from the qnap and I´m thinking of 4 new drives with the largest capacity available. Since all raid must use the same capacity I wonder it in my case become two pools? One pool with 3Tb x 8 and one with 10Tb x 4 drives? Will this work & be safe if a drive fail? Or is this not the optimal solution? Any thoughts?

Thank you. I have seen the posts you mentioned in your video but hoped for a more generalised solution in designing a storage zfs pool, but in truth I wanted to find a ready to use solution for my use case, but I have to admit that this is may not be possible. My use case - I would call it general file storage - but is it really general? Even though I may not have my exact answer, it surely opened my eyes about the topic and that I have to analyse my data a bit further than I have done so far.

Is there a good way to benchmark disk performance without using the cache?

Are you ever going to do a follow-up on the Synology box you had last year?

Quick question, once I get a RaidZ-1 pool, can I expand it into a RaidZ-2 pool later on?

How much Disk space need for log? is it proper idea to use a pen drive for log?

Great video! so I have two NAS with TrueNas: one for fast video editing (RAID-Z0 with 3x 8TB WD Ultrastar) and one for sync backup (RAID-Z2 with 10x 6TB WD Red Pro). I was thinking of adding a fourth disk to the first nas and turning it into raid-z1. What do you think about my configuration?

Ah, a nod to Tank's little brother..

What if all vdevs has only one disc of same capacity. Can I make 3 disc pool with ZFS2? And add one drive in same pool as and when needed without destroying the pool? Please don't mind if my question is stupid. 🤐

Hi there, I'm puzzeled with the topology of how data is stored. I'm using the TrueNAS-12.0-U6.1on a old DELL R520 with 6 real HD and I have only a option to make a Pool out of a number of real hard drives. But the picture in the forum suggest that Real Hard drives are grouped into VDEV's and then put in a Pool. What am I missing.

Friend, I am going to buy a dell r730xd server and I am just starting with 5 disks of 2.4tb sas 2.5 ", I would like to know if after creating the raid array I can add more disk units to the array to give more storage, I have that question, thank you, I follow your videos I have liked

Can you talk about closing the performance gap between ZFS on Linux and ZFS on FBSD? With proper tuning there must be a way to get it close these days considering FBSD using ZoL now.

Sometimes you only have room for a pair of drives and your choice is made for you.

Am I going to want to rebuild my pools after watching this?

Unraid Vs FreeNAS, would Unraid be a better option for recovering data? encase of multiple hardware failure (i.e. If I had Raid Z2 setup with 8 Hard Drives and 3 Hard Drives failed what would happen?, because with Unraid you would only lose that data on that disk). Would love your opinion on both. Unless you already have one then my mistake. Thanks in advance.

the more and more i read about zfs, the more i know i need to spend more money - or i could go back to multiple raid5/6 and be done with it..^^

Real world example for most average home users who are newbies. We have different size hard drives we want to make use of. Hence, my problems. From the documentation: 9.2.6 extending of pool. To Increase capacity of an existing pool, a pop-up warning displays a reminder to stripe VDEVS of the same size! So from my understanding if I install freeNAS on an old machine and I have 3x 3TB, 2x 4TB, 2x8TB I wouldn’t be able to create a pool using two VDEVs? (VDEV1 being 3x 3TB & 2x 4TB RAID Z2 = 9 TB, VDEV2 being 2x 8TB RAID Z1 giving 8 TB) in my newbie mind I thought this would create a pool of 17 TB, but am I wrong? A pool must have VDEVs all of the same raid type? It’s a major headache. I have a Synology NAS and I just want a simple way to backup 15TB, with rSync, then move it offsite for backing up any new videos added but I don’t have a budget to buy a new machine. The great thing about Synology is being able to mix different drive sizes and have redundancy and a nice size of reusable data. If I want to backup 15TB of videos with my spare hard drives (using a simple one destination method) is this not possible with freeNAS? Is this more of something unRAID can solve but not freeNAS?

So, how do I lay out my drives, then?

Bro

I've pretty much moved completely to using mirrors for storage. It just makes so much sense. If the client is particularly small, and needs the redundancy, I can do RAIDZ2 (RAIDZ and RAID 5 are dead). But for the most part, disks are cheap. My base layout is two 2 disk mirrors striped together. Need performance, add another 2 disk mirror. Need more redundancy, add a disk to each mirror. Speaking of redundancy, once you hit 6 disks, a pool of mirrors has better redundancy than RAIDZ2, and arguably better redundancy than RAIDZ3 (all assuming two 3 disk mirrors striped together). And the performance is way better. In all of this, I'm talking about storage for virtual machines. Which is why I was very surprised to hear that you're on the fence about cache drives for VMs. From my experience, even an L2ARC on mirrored rust is going to provide far better caching performance than Windows' or Linux's FIFO cache, especially as the size of the data that could potentially be grabbed increases. VMs tend to get about 4GB of RAM from me starting out, unless they're hosting database software like SQL Server, in which case SQL Server gets memory because the caching it does is similar in performance to the ARC. Other than that, memory increases as various system tasks demand it.

You’re not explaining Raidz variants

56 Dell Users dont like this Trick

.....nah I'm fine with BTRFS, thanks :)

I dont want to be harsh, but i am half way through this video and you have not said anything yet. Tons of words very little content.