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New drive pool recommendations

I

iroc409

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 17, 2006
Messages
1,387
I am considering rebuilding my disk pool on my file server. Currently I have two mirrors in one zpool, two 2TB drives and two 1TB drives. I'm only using 1.68TB according to iostat (1.75 on my backup drive for some reason), but I am getting a nasty bearing noise from one of the drives, and performance isn't particularly stellar. The drives are pretty old, the oldest over 5 years, and I am at the limits of the slowest drive's performance.

The file server is used to store all of my documents (my desktop has basically nothing for local storage), as a backup target for local devices, and for sharing community files. The music collection, software ISOs, etc. I store a couple VM's on the server that I access with VMWare Player. My current server, though I hope to replace sometime soon as it's old as well, currently has 5 SATA ports open on the board (which are partly used by my current array). The server is unattended regularly for short intervals, so I do have a concern about having enough redundancy to survive a couple weeks with a disk failure if possible. Getting a controller for more drives is not out of consideration, but it's just partly going to depend on how budget shakes out the next couple months. The server also is kind of power hungry, so adding more devices will only make it worse.

I have been considering:
-4-disk mirror like current array
-4-disk mirror with an online spare (not sure if spare will take over automatically, but should?)
-4 disk RAIDz2
-5 disk RAIDz3

I would think 6TB would be more than enough space, considering what I am currently using. I am on a big kick of digitizing items, like film, music, print photos, etc. So, my current rate is expanding, but probably not another 4TB in the near future. Some of the material is non-replaceable.
 
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I have personally been very happy with using an 8 drive HBA controller. Currently it's running 8x4TB in a RAIDz2. In my experience, spending the money to get a setup that will last a long time is worth it. If you buy a controller, it's easy to port the drives + controller to a new system if you decide to upgrade mobo/CPU/RAM. Did that not long ago, and the old pool imported to my new system with a single command.

If you were to go with an 8x1TB RAIDz2, you'd have 6TB of usable space, or 12TB if you went with 2TB drives. Nice thing about having either of those setups is you could replace (one by one) each drive with a larger one down the road. Once all drives are replaced your usable space goes up without having to move any data around.

Once you switch the total number of drives in your pool is that you have to do a temp copy/paste, which is a pain. Went through that myself recently when I went from 6x2TB to 8x4TB. Had to use another set of drives to hold the data while I switched drives.

With an 8 drive HBA, you could also do 2xRAIDz1 arrays if you didn't want to get 8 drives all at once. But, then you do run a slightly higher risk of failure. An 8 drive RAIDz3 is also perfectly functional.

Either way, with that much data, you want to make sure any critical data is backed up properly.
 
The controller would certainly be useful in migrating to a virtual setup in the future were I to choose to do so. It would make it fairly easy to move to another server if I stayed on "bare metal" if I went lower-end, as I've also had my eye on some of the lower Dell and Lenovo servers that are cheap now.

I've thought about doing 1TB 2.5" drives. They are usually quieter and require less power than desktop equivalents, and about the same price as their desktop equivalents (in 1TB anyway). I guess the only concern there is the 512/4k block sizes. If 1TB drives were 512 block size, upgrading the pool to larger drives would remain at 512.

My other concern I guess is RAIDz2 vs RAIDz3. I could do 7x RAIDz3, or 8xRAIDz2, to maintain an even number of data drives. If I lost a drive in RAIDz2, and couldn't get to the server for two weeks, wouldn't I be better off with RAIDz3?

My current backup scheme is a set of 3 rotating USB single-disk pools. It does make me a little nervous. I will probably end up with a backup server and externals once I get a new server built, but that will have to wait for the budget to catch up. I think one of the USB disks recently failed, I am still investigating, but that doesn't make me feel any better about single-disk pools.
 
RAIDz3 would give you better uptime (theoretically) than RAIDz2. Can't say that would hurt if you might not make it on-site for that length of time.

For USB back up, I don't see why that setup would be a problem. You have only single disk pools, but they are holding backups. If one goes, or even all three, you still have your data intact.
 
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