Ok so I’m new, semi tech savvy, will be building a home server nas mainly for storage of media, photos, computer backups and maybe as I learn will do more with the machine. Mostly transferring videos and pics from computers. I have 5 wd red plus 4tb hard drives. I have no idea about what raid setup to use. Ideally I don’t want to give up too much storage. I do plan to have these drive backed up consistently (maybe a basic NaS at my moms and backup this server to that nas?).
Also I did order 2 used 6TB wd red drives and realized they are SMR drives and just read they aren’t ideal to use. Any reason to keep them? (Backup NAS at moms?) I can just return them just pay shipping back.
For a home system that doesn’t require the 24/7 availability of a business system, a single raidz1 VDEV configuration could be a reasonable compromise between some measure of parity protection and storage efficiency, since only (the equivalent of) one drive would be used for parity.
However since you apparently buy used drives (with the potential pitfalls that entails), perhaps it’s worth considering a single raidz2 VDEV pool (so the equivalent of two drives is used for parity), especially since your drives are fairly small and you might want to expand your VDEV in the future. (You can use raidz VDEV expansion to add a drive to your VDEV, but you cannot upgrade the raid level without creating a new pool. And for larger VDEVs raidz2 is recommended.)
Of course if cash is tight right now, you could decide to go with raidz1 and - if necessary down the road - destroy the pool, recreate it and restore the data from your backup. But that means that your backup needs to be on reliable storage and needs to be current. (It should be those things in any case.)
[ Let’s see what the ZFS veterans will recommend… ]
I assume your backup NAS would still use some kind of NAS configuration and self-healing file system, so you’d have the same problem there. If it was me, I’d send those SMR drives back.
