Combined SMR and CMR WD Red NAS Drives in Stripe (Raid0)

[AWD1963]

Hello, I am new to FreeNAS as well as creating and running servers in general so I apologize in advance for anything that may have already been talked about or be common knowledge to most.

I have six 4TB WD40EFRX (CMR) and four 6TB WD60EFAX(SMR) as well as a SSD for the operating system. I am looking to create a Plex Media Server for music, videos, tv shows, photos, etc. for my house. My main question is can I combine the 10 HDDs into a single pool when using Stripe (Raid0) configuration even though the drive types are not the same size nor do they use the same method of reading and writing data. I am not worried about redundancy hence why I want to go the Stripe configuration. All of the data will be backed up on external HDDs. So if one of the drives eventually dies, then I will rebuild from those devices.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give.

 

[Heracles]

Hey AWD,

Really, you should not do that... If a single disk fails, it is like all drives fail at once. It is not only -that- drive.

I recommend you go read this old post on the subject...

FreeNAS Without the RAID

I want a Linux free program that manage separate NTFS formatted HDDs. First a disclaimer: my SnapRAID literacy is none. I've just googled for a moment and found their page https://www.snapraid.it/faq#fs Having said that they advertise they support any filesystem. SnapRAID is CLI but they...

www.ixsystems.com

 

[Heracles]

Also, if you keep onsite enough storage capacity to hold your backups, why don't you put these drives in your NAS for redundancy ? It would serve and protect you way better...

 

[AWD1963]

Thanks Heracles,

Here is my current build:
Supermicro X11SSM-F-O
Intel Xeon E3-1245V6
64GB Supermicro MEM-DR416L-HL01-EU24 16GB DDR4 2400 ECC UDIMM Memory RAM
8 Port HBA Card: Lenovo 9240-8i with LSI 9210-8i FW 6Gbps SAS HBA P20 IT Mode ZFS FreeNAS unRAID
16 Port IBM Raid Card: IBM Serve RAID 16-Port 6Gbps SAS-2 SATA Expansion Adapter 46M0997 Firmware 634A
6 x 4TB WD40EFRX
4 x 6TB WD60EFAX
500 GB SSD: This is probably overkill
850 watt EVGA PSU
Fractal Design Node 804

Right now I am just playing around, but before finalizing I wanted to get some feedback. I realize that my suggestion is not optimal and does not fully utilize the functions that FreeNAS provides. The current configuration is setup as a Stripe which gives me 100% disk space. I realize that if one drive fails there is no redundancy and the entire array fails and would have to be rebuilt.

The copies of my movies and TV shows are basically in DVD format with each using 4 to 8 GB of disk space and all of them combined currently occupy about 11TB of space. I could make these in MP4 format which would reduce the space required. Do you have a recommendations?

Yes I could go to a RaidZ1 or RaidZ2, but thought I would try to get the most disk space since 4 of the drives are 6TB and SMR(Did not know they were SMR at the time of purchase). My plan was to slowly change out the 4TB drives for 6TB drives until I got about 60TB of disk space. I did not want to combine CMR/PMR drives with SMR drives in a any raid configuration (Z1, Z2, or Z3). Heard awful things happen when this is done. I am open to suggestions on what you think is the best appraoch.

The current backup storage is 8x4TB WD external drives. These drives have all the backup copies of TV shows and movies that were done in Windows which is also the reason they are not included in the server (Formatted for Windows). The original copies of the TV shows and movies reside on 8 internal hard drives ranging from 2 to 4 TB across 2 different PC's using Windows.

My thought was to create a media server and I am open to suggestions other than FreeNAS if you think there is a better way. Thought I would go with FreeNAS to get the experience of setting up a home server plus there is the Plex plugin which will give me the media server. I can go with Kobi, but not sure I like that route.

Hope that helps to explain my thought process.

Thanks

 

[AWD1963]

As a side note, my dad use to call me Hercules. Thought it was interesting your ID is Heracles.

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

Just chiming in here after reading through this thread quickly. FreeNAS and ZFS were designed with data integrity in mind. That means that certain performance tradeoffs may have been made in favor of integrity and reliability. That is not to say that FreeNAS perform poorly; just that certain design and hardware considerations must be taken into consideration when making use of the system. FreeNAS, configured properly, will give you better data integrity than external hard drives. Often to configure a FreeNAS server properly to be reliable and performant costs a bit of money.

One thing to consider with your backups is what your time is worth to you. If you go with a pool composed of 10 single-drive vdevs you will lose your pool at some point, probably sooner rather than later. That leaves you hoping your data is on your external HDD and hoping the drive and enclosure have not had any hardware issues since last use. If that fails too you may find yourself reripping all those DVDs, a very time consuming process.

Your proposed solution puts FreeNAS in a position where it was not designed to excel. So, you're taking the downsides without the upsides. I use my FreeNAS system as a media server; but I don't use single-disk vdevs in a pool. If you're not interested in the data integrity features of FreeNAS I think your setup would be better served by a different NAS solution; one which does not use ZFS so that you're not at risk of losing your entire pool when 1 disk fails. I like Heracles' suggestion of moving your backup drives into your NAS. My approach is to actually run two FreeNAS servers at home. My primary server runs Plex and other tools I use regularly. The second server is my backup server; its sole job is to keep backups of my data safe. This is certainly the more involved, expensive route to take. Buying used parts helped me keep costs low.

Whatever path you choose, I do suggest you consider using FreeNAS in the way it was intended or consider another solution altogether. I worry that if you use it in the way you propose you will have a bad experience with FreeNAS that will cause you headaches and many lost hours of work recovering from a failed pool.

My main question is can I combine the 10 HDDs into a single pool when using Stripe (Raid0) configuration . . .

Just to clarify this a little bit, what you're talking about is a pool made up of 10 vdevs where each vdev is 1 disk wide. Pools hold data. Pools are made of vdevs. Vdevs are made of disks. Vdevs may be single-disk, mirrored, RAIDZ1, RAIDZ2, or RAIDZ2 vdevs. Regardless of the type of vdevs you use, if a single vdev in a pool fails the pool fails.

I hope this is helpful. Can you maybe say a bit about why you're interested in FreeNAS but are not interested in the features designed to protect your data?

 

[AWD1963]

Thank PhiloEpisteme,

One thing to consider with your backups is what your time is worth to you.

Just to clarify this a little bit, what you're talking about is a pool made up of 10 vdevs where each vdev is 1 disk wide. Pools hold data. Pools are made of vdevs. Vdevs are made of disks. Vdevs may be single-disk, mirrored, RAIDZ1, RAIDZ2, or RAIDZ2 vdevs. Regardless of the type of vdevs you use, if a single vdev in a pool fails the pool fails.

I hope this is helpful. Can you maybe say a bit about why you're interested in FreeNAS but are not interested in the features designed to protect your data?

My time is worth a lot since it is the only resource I have that cannot be replenished. When a day is gone, that time is gone forever. Yes I realize that almost sounds hypocritical. If my time is worth so much, then why not use FreeNAS as it was intended to help with data loss. My only thought here was that I had 4x6TB HDDs that I just discovered were SMR and not CMR/PMR.

I am interested in the features that FreeNAS has to offer, but had planned on using where I really care about the data such as backing up documents and/or creating disk images. To me this was replaceable data. There is some cases where if the data was lost would be devastating.

For this particular build I was looking at 1 vdev with 10 disks for a total of 48TB in Stripe configuration. Another option I had this morning while thinking about what Heracles said was to buy 4 more 4TB drives that are CMR and make it a Raid Z1. This would give me 36TB of storage with 4TB of redundancy(simply put).

All I am after at the moment is creating a place where all the movies, tv shows, music, and photos reside instead of being spread out across multiple PCs and/or external hdds and thought a NAS would be the best option. From this single location, movies and tv shows could be watched, music could be listened too, photos could be seen from any device in the house.

If FreeNAS with Plex is not the best option, I am open to suggestions.

Thanks

 

[AWD1963]

I realized after I posted, that it is 1 pool with 10 HDDs. As a Stripe, I guess that would make it 10 vdevs.

Thanks