Newbie what can I do with my two WD blue 2tb drives or do I need to upgrade?

TrueNAS General
1

Apologies in advance.
I want to enter the truenas world and convert my old pc.
It is basically used just to strore photos and stream some random videos by plex. The photos are backed up to the cloud as well and to another USB drive stored offsite.

I have two WE blue 2tb drives - trying to understand it but look like all I could do is mirror the storage meaning I have 2tb in total? Is it worth adding another 2tb drive? or waiting until I can afford some larger drives?

thank you in advance!

2

Pls post the exact type of the WD blue 2TB.
It seems that the 7200rpm version is a SMR drive, while the 5400rpm one is CMR.

SMR drives are unsuitable for Truenas.

If you want a mirror or a 3 wide raidz1 depends on your preference, future expansion plans, budget and risk tolerance.

Mirrors are easy and fast. But can not be expanded 1 drive at a time.

3

Thanks @Farout
Turns out I have two different drives!
ST2000DM001-9YN164 - Seagate Barracuda
WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0 - WD cavier green?

Both appear to be CMR drives.

I was debating now to keep those 2 drives and just mirror them?
And then purchase 2 x 8tb drives and mirror them?

In the future I could by more 8tb drives if required and expanded to a proper raidz setup.

aka - lost :slight_smile:

4

This is how its done. But remember. You will have 4 drives, 2 vdevs, and you can lose 1 drive in each vdev. Not 2 in the same.

On the other hand, with a 4 wide raidz2 in one vdev. You could lose any two !

5

thanks @Farout

With mirroring - I have 0 redundancy currently accepting that I could lose 1 disk out of each vdev and recover is ok? The risk being that I lose 2 disks at the same time? With this in total I would have 10tb in total storage available?

With 4 wide raidz2 - if i had 2 x 2tb and 2 x 8 tb what would my total storage be? I read it is only as big as the smallest capacity in the group? so would it be 4tb in total?

6

RAIDZx with mixed capacity is waisting the bigger drives.

Another drive failing during pool rebuild ( resilvering ) is not uncommon. However the risk is less with mirrors, since resilver times are faster.