I have only considered Raidz2.
But now 4 large drives in z2, w room to add 2 more. Instead of 6 drives w. no expansion possibility.
I’ll have a look in the drawer, and see if i have some old 3.5".
Wonder if putting in all 6 would make the drive cage-mount balance better too.
But the 304’ seems to be “quality”, and cage mounts are not “thin sheet” optimized by some eager “designcost saver”.
I think i need to clarify my post above, where i refer to backups on my Supermicro (Primary NAS) , and also referred to my “Backup Epyc NAS - 6 x 4TB”
It was a bit confusing.
My Epyc would inherit the 4TB drives that’s currently in the Supermicro.
And will be 3’rd storage for important data, powered on weekly to zfs replicate from Supermicro.
While i’d love to have same capacity as on the Supermicro, my budget won’t allow that.
So i guess i’ll make a “ToEpyc” dataset on the Supermicro, with “most important data”, and keep that at max. 10…12TB
I did read the “Fester series” - Thank you for making that.
And i also saw the @Stux - Tired replication on YT.
Just re-skimmed this topic. It seems to have gone round in circles a bit… sorry about that
As there are a lot of Node 304 owners in here, you may be interested in an update on my Node 304 system.
I hit 80% full on the 6x 8T RaidZ2 I was using… and I had to make a pretty quick upgrade decision based on my rate of fill and how long it’d take to replace each drive with a larger.
Initially I worked out that 16T was the sweet spot for $/TB at local retail, and was happy with the 4 → 8 → 16T doubling progression.
But then I figured out that 22T disks were only marginally more expensive per TB, but when factoring in the bay cost, and calculating it based on how much I was paying for the extra space, it worked out as better value to get the 22T disks, at least in my estimation.
I ended up with 6x 22TB Seagate IronWolf Pro. The warranty is good, and the peak performance is much better than the old 8TB disks too.
24TB disks has a very large price premium (an extra 25% for 2 extra TB!)
I could then replace a pair of disks and resilver two disks at once (offline two disks, replace them physically, then power on and replace logically)
If I had’ve had any i/o errors during the replace, I would’ve restored one of the disks… ( you can cancel a replace by detaching the new disk… iirc)
Anyway, took 10 days to burn in all the disks on another system, and about a week to do the replace all up.
Here 16…18TB vs 20+TB had a crazy price increase
16TB seems to be the sweet spot (Ironwolf Pro ST16000NT001 costs the same as N300).
Just the N300 18TB is reasonable, just $25 more than the above 16TB.
I have had some baaaad experiences w Seagate back in the days … So even the name makes me cringle.
But is the IW Pro better than the N300 (endurance etc …)
The Toshiba N300 doesn’t impress, but it’s better than the X300. Its specifications and warranty are fine for multi-drive storage solutions, but it doesn’t excel in any performance category and must rely on tight pricing — an area where it currently falls behind the N300 Pro.
When I researched the drives I was looking at, I thought the N300 was a relatively slow drive, and the IronWolf Pro was a relatively fast drive, but maybe that’s not the case at 18TB
