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Adding 3 drives at a time is expensive and a non-option for a home NAS. As is "just copy it to a new server". Both have high investment costs for something a p

by tscs37 9y ago

Adding 3 drives at a time is expensive and a non-option for a home NAS. As is "just copy it to a new server". Both have high investment costs for something a plain mdRAID, snapRAID or LVM RAID can achieve far simpler with better results.

snuxoll 9y ago
I add two at a time without much problem, mind you I have a rather extreme setup with an external 12-bay enclosure but I feel most people building a NAS instead of buying an off-the-shelf system from Synology/Drobo aren't looking to cut costs or corners. A 4TB Seagate IronWolf drive costs $129 off Amazon, buying two to add as a new mirrored vdev to my TrueNAS box isn't outrageous.
- tscs37 9y ago
  Reducing the cost of a custom system isn't irrational. My own personal budget is very limited, buying two IronWolf HDDs in this case is easily a good chunk of my monthly income. If I can build a NAS that can expand with single drives as needed, it's more cost effective for me. And I imagine a lot of others have the same problem. In the end, by buying 2 drives when a single drive could have solved the problem equally well: expanding your space by 4TB, is wasting money. Period.
- problems 9y ago
  You're limited then to only mirroring, you can't do RAID6 or similar on a massive array where you're only giving up 2/10 drives space but can have a 2 disk failure. Seems like a lot of wasted disks when the only thing I'm dependent on the NAS for is not losing my TV collection. Right now I know if that if I go out and buy 2 more 4 TB disk I get 8 TB more in my NAS and at the price of an only slightly increased risk of having more than 2 drives fail at once. That's probably my favorite feature of RAID6 for a home NAS. I actually went custom because those off-the-shelf boxes are either very expensive or have weak CPUs so can't be used for video transcoding very well - it's cheaper to build it yourself, much cheaper if you already have old hardware to dedicate to the task.
  - snuxoll 9y ago
    Different use cases I suppose, my FreeNAS box stores my video collection and all the usual stuff but I've also got all the VM's that run my home network stored on it - performance+resliver times are a lot more important to me than storage efficiency.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - problems 9y ago
      And your network-running VMs have high disk IO requirements?
      - snuxoll 9y ago
        All of my virtual disks are hosted off my FreeNAS, I've got a direct 10GbE link between it and my oVirt host - raw throughput isn't so much the issue most of the time as IOPS are, I've got a local gitlab instance, OpenShift, some PostgreSQL databases, etc. and they like to hammer the crap out of my storage when in use. Having an L2ARC helps out quite a bit, but only having 32GB of memory and wanting to keep most of it for the L1ARC means I still hit my spinning disks regularly (and mirrored vdev's help read IOPS tremendously in this case).

by tscs37 9y ago

snuxoll 9y ago

I add two at a time without much problem, mind you I have a rather extreme setup with an external 12-bay enclosure but I feel most people building a NAS instead of buying an off-the-shelf system from Synology/Drobo aren't looking to cut costs or corners. A 4TB Seagate IronWolf drive costs $129 off Amazon, buying two to add as a new mirrored vdev to my TrueNAS box isn't outrageous.

tscs37 9y ago
Reducing the cost of a custom system isn't irrational. My own personal budget is very limited, buying two IronWolf HDDs in this case is easily a good chunk of my monthly income. If I can build a NAS that can expand with single drives as needed, it's more cost effective for me. And I imagine a lot of others have the same problem. In the end, by buying 2 drives when a single drive could have solved the problem equally well: expanding your space by 4TB, is wasting money. Period.
problems 9y ago
You're limited then to only mirroring, you can't do RAID6 or similar on a massive array where you're only giving up 2/10 drives space but can have a 2 disk failure. Seems like a lot of wasted disks when the only thing I'm dependent on the NAS for is not losing my TV collection. Right now I know if that if I go out and buy 2 more 4 TB disk I get 8 TB more in my NAS and at the price of an only slightly increased risk of having more than 2 drives fail at once. That's probably my favorite feature of RAID6 for a home NAS. I actually went custom because those off-the-shelf boxes are either very expensive or have weak CPUs so can't be used for video transcoding very well - it's cheaper to build it yourself, much cheaper if you already have old hardware to dedicate to the task.
- snuxoll 9y ago
  Different use cases I suppose, my FreeNAS box stores my video collection and all the usual stuff but I've also got all the VM's that run my home network stored on it - performance+resliver times are a lot more important to me than storage efficiency.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - problems 9y ago
    And your network-running VMs have high disk IO requirements?
    - snuxoll 9y ago
      All of my virtual disks are hosted off my FreeNAS, I've got a direct 10GbE link between it and my oVirt host - raw throughput isn't so much the issue most of the time as IOPS are, I've got a local gitlab instance, OpenShift, some PostgreSQL databases, etc. and they like to hammer the crap out of my storage when in use. Having an L2ARC helps out quite a bit, but only having 32GB of memory and wanting to keep most of it for the L1ARC means I still hit my spinning disks regularly (and mirrored vdev's help read IOPS tremendously in this case).