So, I have an old pc. That I am building into a NAS. My brother and I have a bunch of SSD and HDD drives we would like to use for now. Most are 2T drives but I do have 2 3T HDD drives I want to use as well. The drives are made by different companies. I have been told that True NAS will not work with mixed drives. Can someone please help?
Not 100% but what you mean; do you mean mixed sizes? It’ll work, but your smallest size drive will keep the larger drives under utilized. For example, if you have five 6tb drives & one 2tb drive in the same pool - it’ll be as if you were using six 2tb drives; very sub-optimal.
I’d recommend making sure the drives are all CMR, as at that size there is a solid chance of having SMR drives & that is something you very much want to avoid.
Very little will “not work” with truenas.
2x 2 TB and 2x 3 TB you can use as 2 pairs of mirrors ( as long as they are CMR).
But then again, if you would know that a big commercial storage provider would store your important data on “an old PC with some drives they had lying around”…would you entrust them your data ?
I’ll assume that you meant mixed vendors here.
This is outdated advice from [some] classic RAID5/6 implementations. Those have some rough similarities to ZFS and TrueNAS, but also some significant differences.
TrueNAS wisdom says that it’s often better to not have all of your drives come from the same assembly line on the same day. This is for the simple reason that you don’t want them to all share the same weaknesses, or to fall over at roughly the same time.
With that said: you will want every drive in a vdev to be of a similar size, because if they’re not then the smallest one limits how much space the others can contribute.
You’ll also want every drive in a vdev to be of a similar speed, because if they’re not then the slowest one limits how fast the others can perform.
These are guidelines for efficiency — they’re not laws of TrueNAS or ZFS or physics.
Have fun!
So i have 6x 2T drives some are ssds and some hdds then i have 2x 3T nas hdd drives. Over time the plane is too upgrade to all 12T nas hdd drives and be used as a whole family nas for pictures and files for the family. Starting small with zero to small budget with just my house and my brother’s house.