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I'm in the midst of changing to a new system to be able to expand my storage.
Currently my old case could only store 10 HDD slots so I got a Norco RPC 4224 that can afford 24 hotswap slots. Along the way I also got a dual CPU mobo and an actual Xeon CPU this time with 32GB EEC DDR4 RAM which I can expand up to 1TB (I won't but just saying!
).
I'm using LSI MegaRAID SAS 9261-8i card that was connected to the 8 HDDS and got a SAS expander for the new system.
I haven't decided if I will move the old system (windows 7) to the new machine or use another one, here is where you guys come to help!.
Basically I was running these things from the old server:
- Application server (gaming server where users launch the game directly from the server via a software without any installation)
- Backup server (Each user in the house (about 20+) have weekly backup)
- FTP server/Cloud (each user can have access to their backup files
- Media server (Running PLEX with lots of movies+tv shows+music+anime, etc...)
- Virtual machine (running multiple virtual machines for multiple purposes.
- CCTV recorder server
The old configuration was 8HDDs in RAID6 but I didn't start with 6, they were 4HDDs in RAID5 but I kept expanding one at a time until it reached 8 and changed it to RAID6 but I would rather not go through that process again because expanding from the 7th to the 8th HDD took about 2 months!
now with 24 HDDs, whats the best setup that I could follow? I was thinking of doing only setup of 4s all in RAID5 then just pooling them in windows? or should I change the entire thing and go for FreeNAS with ZFS? I'm running out of time and need to change to the new system in less than 2 weeks. The problem with ZFS is that I won't be able to add HDDs as I please which is a negative thing for me.
This is my initial plan:
2 HDDs for OS/OSs (RAID 1)
2-4 WD purple for CCTV (RAID1 or 5)
8-16 WD RED 4TB in (4xRAID5 or 8xRAID6)
then just some hot-spares~
Now for the old system, having a hardware RAID card was good because it was a very weak system, however now that i'm getting a much powerful system (2x Xeon E5-2620) I might be able to get better performances from using a software RAID (FreeNAS) and since i'm using SAS Expander I think that will decrease my RAID card performance. But i've been very comfortable with this card now that i've been using it for 3 years. I've been reading a lot and I got myself an IBM M1015 to prepare for FreeNAS but i'm being hesitant about using it.
If I choose the FreeNAS, I will install ESXi then run a VM to install FreeNAS and setup it up from there. Then i'll just add VMs as I please.
Which route should I go to?
Currently my old case could only store 10 HDD slots so I got a Norco RPC 4224 that can afford 24 hotswap slots. Along the way I also got a dual CPU mobo and an actual Xeon CPU this time with 32GB EEC DDR4 RAM which I can expand up to 1TB (I won't but just saying!
).I'm using LSI MegaRAID SAS 9261-8i card that was connected to the 8 HDDS and got a SAS expander for the new system.
I haven't decided if I will move the old system (windows 7) to the new machine or use another one, here is where you guys come to help!.
Basically I was running these things from the old server:
- Application server (gaming server where users launch the game directly from the server via a software without any installation)
- Backup server (Each user in the house (about 20+) have weekly backup)
- FTP server/Cloud (each user can have access to their backup files
- Media server (Running PLEX with lots of movies+tv shows+music+anime, etc...)
- Virtual machine (running multiple virtual machines for multiple purposes.
- CCTV recorder server
The old configuration was 8HDDs in RAID6 but I didn't start with 6, they were 4HDDs in RAID5 but I kept expanding one at a time until it reached 8 and changed it to RAID6 but I would rather not go through that process again because expanding from the 7th to the 8th HDD took about 2 months!
now with 24 HDDs, whats the best setup that I could follow? I was thinking of doing only setup of 4s all in RAID5 then just pooling them in windows? or should I change the entire thing and go for FreeNAS with ZFS? I'm running out of time and need to change to the new system in less than 2 weeks. The problem with ZFS is that I won't be able to add HDDs as I please which is a negative thing for me.
This is my initial plan:
2 HDDs for OS/OSs (RAID 1)
2-4 WD purple for CCTV (RAID1 or 5)
8-16 WD RED 4TB in (4xRAID5 or 8xRAID6)
then just some hot-spares~
Now for the old system, having a hardware RAID card was good because it was a very weak system, however now that i'm getting a much powerful system (2x Xeon E5-2620) I might be able to get better performances from using a software RAID (FreeNAS) and since i'm using SAS Expander I think that will decrease my RAID card performance. But i've been very comfortable with this card now that i've been using it for 3 years. I've been reading a lot and I got myself an IBM M1015 to prepare for FreeNAS but i'm being hesitant about using it.
If I choose the FreeNAS, I will install ESXi then run a VM to install FreeNAS and setup it up from there. Then i'll just add VMs as I please.
Which route should I go to?
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