Regular drives in array

Strahan

n00b
Joined
Oct 28, 2007
Messages
47
Hi. I seem to recall reading somewhere that you can get away with using non-NAS certified drives with a software RAID like FreeNAS; that you won't have the drop out problems. Is that accurate? My current setup is:

Chenbro RM-4140U case (16 hot swap bays, SATA backplane)
16 WD10EACS 1 TB drives with TLER enabled
Areca ARC-1160ML2 controller
ASUS M2N-LR mobo with Opteron 1218 2.6 GHz CPU
2x G.Skill 2GB DDR2 800

Since I read that you can't enable TLER on the newer drives I started looking into alternates. Of course, looking at the 3 TB offerings I see a NAS Seagate isn't much more than the regular one, but I was curious anyway. My mobo/cpu is also getting a bit "long in the tooth", think it will be up to running FreeNAS for a 42 TB RAID6 array?

Thanks!

EDIT: Actually, I just remembered that you need a buttload of RAM for FreeNAS so disregard the mobo question. I'll yank it and replace it with a mobo that has better memory support and max it out. I read that the rule of thumb is 1 GB per TB, but do you think I could skate by with 32 GB or would it be better to just go 64? Well.. obviously it would be better, I guess what I mean is would it be worth the increase in cost? I'm not concerned with performance, just so long as I can stream full HD from it to my HTPC with no lag issues.
 
Last edited:
You don't need that much RAM for ZFS really. I had 20TB of data on 8GB and it ran completely fine. You also don't need much of a processor for ZFS either.

Honestly if this is a media server you could get by with 4GB of RAM and an old dual core CPU and it would still max out a 1Gbit LAN.
 
I read that the rule of thumb is 1 GB per TB

You do not need anywhere near that unless you use deduplication. I certainly do not have that for my servers at work.
 
Ram requirements just depends on usage and performance requirements. 16GB should be fine for movie streams, but damn.. 42TB just for movies?

Freenas can have problems with less than 8GB these days i probably wouldnt go less than that.
 
Sounds good. I noticed that Seagate's NAS drives are only $10 more than regular, so I may as well just buy those. I'll max out my board (32 GB) and if worst comes to worst, I can just fall back to my original Windows server setup.


Ram requirements just depends on usage and performance requirements. 16GB should be fine for movie streams, but damn.. 42TB just for movies?

Well, I'm over building so I won't have to worry about this for awhile heh. This will be holding more than just my movies, gonna throw everything on it. Once it's all loaded up, I'll likely only be using ~20 TB or so. I figured my current 14 TB build last me from 2007 to about a year ago when I had to start deleting stuff to make room so 42 should keep me content for awhile :)
 
For what it's worth I have used nothing but consumer grade drives (not even "Red" drives) in RAID5 arrays for the last 4 years. First I used a Dell Perc5i (hardware raid) and now I am using ZFS on OSX. Not once have I ever had a drive drop out of the pool. I was more afraid with the hardware implementation, so much so that I kept the drives spun up all the time. ZFS seems to be very lenient with the drives. I now let them sleep and they all get spun up sequentially, so 5 drives takes about 10-15 seconds and ZFS has never had an issue with it.
 
I use desktop drives on my current ZFS array (19*2TB in RAIDZ3), I plan to buy NAS drives (Hitachi 4TB) soon because they're not even a bit more expensive than desktop ones, but I'm not worried about TLER.

For storage 16GB will be more than fine, I'm at 8GB ECC currently and will only go to 16GB because I'm on one stick so single channel, not really good considering I've got a 6-core CPU (Phenom II 1045T), however I've not seen any adverse effect and my array benches at 400MB/s, the 1Gb/s network is the limiting factor by far. The CPU is 99% idle.
 
Back
Top