Hello, I have TrueNAS Scale installed, and I have two 10TB disks and one 2TB disk. What RAID setup would be best for me to use?
I assume you have a separate disk for the boot / boot pool?
Mirror the two 10TB in one VDEV. The 2TB can be a VDEV and pool by itself.
If both drives fail in mirror, you lose the pool. If the single drive fails, you lose the pool.
BASICS
iX Systems pool layout whitepaper
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I assume you have a seperate boot device and that all the mentioned disks are HDD’s
Throw away the 2TB disk - its not worth using
Keep the 2*10TB, one vdev, RAIDZ1
If my disks are connected directly to the motherboard, it will be a software RAID, but if I connect my hard drives through an HBA and choose a ZFS RAIDZ1 in TrueNAS, will it be considered hardware RAID? I read on the forum that hardware RAID is much better.
Raid-Z1 requires three, equal size disks to create using the GUI. If you used all your disks and did that, your pool will be 2TB or less. We avoid hardware RAID controllers unless they can be flashed to IT mode and give direct access to ZFS / TrueNAS.
You don’t set up any sort of RAID using the motherboard. Just plain disks. Turn off any RAID options in the BIOS / UEFI.
No.
I suspect you will find that many here think the exact opposite.
To elaborate a bit on that. A big negative with configuring RAID directly in the controller is that if something happens to the controller, your RAID is typically toast. You may be able to recover by getting a new controller of the same make and model. Maybe.
By keeping the setup in software, like how ZFS likes to do it, you can be a lot more hardware agnostic.
So, there is no point in having a hardware RAID controller, and for now, it’s better to set up a RAID mirror for data protection. If in the future I buy another 10TB hard drive, should I keep the RAID mirror or choose another configuration? I need fault tolerance and speed.
You should read the ZFS primer linked above and start using the ZFS terms so there is less confusion as to what you mean.
Speed for what, reads, writes? Fault tolerance? How many drives failing before pool is dead?
If you start with a ZFS mirror VDEV of two 10TB drives, your choices for adding another would be making it a three way ZFS mirror or destroying the pool and recreating the VDEV as a three member Raid-Z1.
The mirror option can lose two drives and still function. Reads are fast, across 3 devices, writes are slow.
Raid-Z1 can only lose one of three drives. It gains the parity function.
EDIT - adding most of this information is covered by the two links I provided earlier