G+_Erik Ellsinger Posted June 22, 2015 Share Posted June 22, 2015 I'm thinking about trying out Freenas and I have some drives over that I thought I might use. I'm wondering if it would be possible to build a Freenas box using Raid5 with different sized drives? I have two 500GB and one 1TB drive. Does anyone know if that would work? Not a ideal setup but I just want to try Freenas and see what it's like. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_John Mink Posted June 22, 2015 Share Posted June 22, 2015 I haven't tried this personally on my NAS but you should certainly be able to make a pool of 3 drives, each 500 GB. In theory, you could split the 1 TB into 2x 500GB drives, but I wouldn't recommend it as you're looking at single parity, so if that drive dies you will lose data. Also, technical note but I don't know if FreeNAS supports RAID or just RAIDZ. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Erik Ellsinger Posted June 22, 2015 Author Share Posted June 22, 2015 Okay, I guess I will have to try and see! This setup is just for testing, if I like I will build a real Freenas box. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_John Mink Posted June 22, 2015 Share Posted June 22, 2015 After building a test NAS a few years ago, I highly recommend it! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Erik Ellsinger Posted June 22, 2015 Author Share Posted June 22, 2015 Do you do anything to backup the content of your NAS or is your NAS your backup? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_John Mink Posted June 22, 2015 Share Posted June 22, 2015 Funny you should ask as I'm in the process of building a 2nd NAS for that purpose. My NAS is actually the only copy of my data >_< Well, that's not entirely true. Much of it is backed up to the cloud or some other device....but nothing comprehensive. My current plan is to eventually setup HAST/CARP which, best I can tell, is like mirroring the entire NAS so that if one dies, the other NAS will continue to run. I expect it's more complicated than that (following the "it always is" rule), but I'm getting ahead of myself... Right now I don't back it up at all, but once I get NAS #2 up and running I'll at least try and move some of the critical files over (although most of those are backed up in some form or another). That said, I would absolutely recommend somehow backing up your data/NAS! Any thoughts on you were going to back up that data? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Erik Ellsinger Posted June 22, 2015 Author Share Posted June 22, 2015 So are you using FreeNAS for that second NAS? I would like to have a setup with FreeNAS as my primary storing device and then another FreeNAS box off-site that holds a backup of that primary FreeNAS box. Was thinking of using Crashplan to transfer the data and keep the backup up to date. Only problem is that I would imagine having two FreeNAS boxes would be really expensive. Especially if I would like to save and backup 10 - 15 TB of data. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_John Mink Posted June 22, 2015 Share Posted June 22, 2015 I went NAS4FREE instead of FreeNAS (not a huge difference for files) on the 1st NAS, and it seems like HAST/CARP much prefers the same OS. As for x2 NAS....yeah, it's not cheap...which is why I've been running on just one for so long >_< Crashplan could work if you're using it point to point. You set them up locally and then you're only syncing the diff over the web. Otherwise, you've got 10-15TB to sync (up AND down) over a how many Mb/s connection? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Jason Marsh Posted June 22, 2015 Share Posted June 22, 2015 Erik Ellsinger Yeah, that could get spendy. Yes you can use different sized drives, but essentially each drive will hold no more than the smallest drive, and the largest drive will be used for parity. Basically, with a pair of 500GB and a 1TB, the 500's would hold data and the 1TB would hold 500GB worth of parity data. For a non-RAID system like DrivePool or UnRAID, you get all the space on all the drives, divided by your redundancy factor, as well as being able to add capacity by simply adding drives or upgrading the smaller drives. I know everyone likes to roll their own, and I have done so myself in the past, but I've had zero unscheduled downtime from my WHS2011 with StableBit DrivePool. Even if WHS soils the sheets I can pop out the drives and use or copy my data with any system that reads NTFS volumes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Erik Ellsinger Posted June 23, 2015 Author Share Posted June 23, 2015 The idea with Crashplan would be to do a local sync first of the bulk data and then only sync the changes over the internet, and it would be over fiber so it wouldn't be too bad. Jason Marsh Thanks for clarifying how it works with different sized drives, I will set it up and see how it goes :D Does anyone know if it in FreeNAS is possible to divided your raid into several "virtual harddrives"? For instance if I have a raid5 array with a total usuable storage size of 6TB, could I in FreeNAS divied that into two 3TB virtual harddrives? And would I be able to add more storage to my virtual harddrive when I add more harddrives to the array? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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