Building a new True NAS sys, starting with 4 drives, but want to build out to 8

TrueNAS General
21

I have 9 drives and I am running 3x3 raidz1 in one pool. Meaning…
Tank pool
vdev 1: 3 drives raidz1
vdev 2: 3 drive raidz1
vdev 3: 3 drive raidz1

Is this a bad way to do it?

1 Like
22

9 drives: 6 data, 3 parity (“worth of” since it’s all distributed)
yet you can only loose one drive in each vdev before you lose all—possibly meaning that loss of two drives is fatal

9-wide raidz2 would give one more drive worth of space, yet resist the loss of ANY two drives

9-wide raidz3 would give the same space (6:3) but much higher resiliency, resisting the loss of any three drives

It’s your data, your pool and your decision. But a stripe of three 3-wide raidz1 is arguably not the best allocation of available hardware.

2 Likes
23

What is your use-case?

1 Like
24

Use cases:

  1. 4 VMs for code development
  2. SQL Server container for database development
  3. KiCAD container work for schematic capture work
  4. LLM container for AI work
  5. NGINX container for web development
  6. Potential Jellyfin container for media streaming

Thanks!
-Rodney

25

So you are not using the NAS as a pure file server at all?

1 Like
26

Sorry, yes, 7. NAS storage space for 3 Macs and two iPads, and all the VMs.

-Rodney

27

So, Chris, to answer your question: my NAS is not a pure NAS.

What intrigued me from the very beginning when learning about TrueNAS, was all it could do in addition to being a NAS platform, first and foremost.

For many years I ran MS SQLServer in a container on an old Intel Mac MINI for development work. This setup stopped working when I upgraded the container software, but could not upgrade Mac OS to satisfy the new container environment.

I was going to buy a new Mac to act as a server, but wow was that expensive!

At the time, my cousin was working in the maintenance department at MIT, and one of the departments at the school happened to be dumping a whole bunch of 10th generation Dell servers. Out of that dumpster dive, I got an R310, an R410 free.

Many hours of YouTube learning later, I spent far less than the cost of a new Mac to make these machines very useful indeed. The 310 runs Ubuntu, and the 410 is the principal TrueNAS server, that not only runs that SQL Server container that used to run on my old Mac, but a wealth of other stuff, I really wasn’t thinking about.

I’m very glad to have taken on this journey and the TrueNAS platform has worked brilliantly for all of my current work and new work I wish to explore.

Thanks!
-Rodney

1 Like
28

@ChrisRJ was very right to ask the question, because your VMs and databases (many small transactions) would do better on mirrors (SSDs?), while the media streamed by Jellyfin matches well to a raidz#. So you may need two pools, and in any case more drives.

29

@rodneysing , thanks for the details.

As @etorix already wrote, you really want a separate pool (SSD mirror) for the applications.

Many years ago I tried using a RAIDZ1 with ESXi and it was slow beyond usable. In one case the Windows VM even crashed with a blue screen because it hit a timeout.