Recommended strategy for 8 x 12TB disks

TrueNAS General
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Hi Everyone,

I’m building my first TrueNas server with the r730xd as my base. The system specs are as follows:
Dual Xeon E5-2640 v4
128 GB ECC Ram
4 x 12TB Seagate IronWolf hard drives (Media storage for Plex)
4 x 960GB 6G 1.8" SATA MLC SSD (Shared VM Storage for my ProxMox Cluster)
Dell HBA330 mini controller
Dell Intel X520 I350 (Dual GE and Dual 10GE)
HP Mellanox 544QSFP (for communication with my ProxMox VM Cluster)

My question concerns future growth. Initially, I thought that I would create a RAIDZ1 pool with the 4 x 12TB hard drives, with the goal of adding a second identical pool to the VDEV at some point in the future.

After a bunch of reading, I’m now on the fence and considering just getting the second set of four hard drives and starting with an 8 disk RAIDZ2. As I understand it, this would be more resilient than having two pools in the VDEV, with each set only having a single disk fault tolerance. Am I overthinking this? What route would you guys go?

Also, when creating the pools, how impactful is using all the same brand/model drives vs having 12TB drives from different manufacturers? For example, mixing an Iron Wolf NAS drive with a Western Digital NAS drive.

Thanks in advance for any feedback/advice.

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I’d go with the 8wZ2 upfront.

Double disk redundancy, 25% parity ratio. It’s a good compromise.

It doesn’t really matter if you mix disks from different manufacturers, in fact some people do it to avoid bad batch issues.

Helps if the disks have similar performance, but most disks do :wink:

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Yeah, that’s where I was leaning. I bit the bullet and purchased four more 12TB hard drives. I’ll just sleep better with RAIDZ2.

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Follow-up question. My server can accommodate as many as 12 3.5" disks. If I were to fully populate the server, what option would you recommend:

12 x 12TB RAIDZ3
or a pool of two 6 x 12TB RAIDZ2

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I would use 2x 6wZ2

I find it easier to upgrade vdevs which are less wide, performance is supposed to be better, and it will provide double the IOPs.

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