TrueNAS Core non-raid pools?

[uberwebguru]

I am have been debating going NAS or waiting it out for a bit
One of the main reasons i like NAS is the shared setup and also the thin-provisioning storage you get with it
You hook up hypervisor hosts to it and you can create clustered applications with the shared storage setup and also enjoy thin-provisioning for better consolidated storage

So what i am planning on doing is go non-raid pools! Yeah unconventional, but hey use-cases are key.
I will be using 1 drive HDD or SSD per pool, this will mimic local direct storage BUT i get to enjoy the mentioned benefits shared storage and thin-provisioning
For example if i have 20TB HDD, that will be for 1 single pool tagged HDD, and 8TB SSD will be for 1 single pool tagged SSD
The larger capacity drives make this setup very possible and viable also

only thing i will lose are latency and performance
Advantage of this setup? Well guess what no matter how much RAID you got, you always need backup regardless, right?
Exactly so i will just invest properly in backup.

What i get with this setup, is decentralization, meaning if 1 disk dies, i dont need to lose sleep, compared to if data gets corrupted in a giant pool, you start to lose sleep. Another gain? I get to use all storage space. No more losing half storage in the name of mirrors.

Anyone else tried this setup or played with this idea?

 

[uberwebguru]

Can you scale this way? Yes you can!!!
You can also go really big with 100TB nimbus ssd for example

Pricing - Nimbus Data

ExaDrive NL Pricing Capacity SATA Model # SAS Model # Price ExaDrive NL – 16 TB EDNLT016 EDNLS016 $3,200 ExaDrive NL – 32 TB EDNLT032 EDNLS032 $6,200 ExaDrive NL – 64 TB EDNLT064 EDNLS064 $12,000 ExaDrive DC Pricing Capacity SATA Model # SAS Model # Price ExaDrive DC – 16 TB EDDCT016 EDDCS016...

nimbusdata.com

And with Moore's law, the sky is the limit
No need to be going after 60 drive storage chassis anymore!

Go lean, go dense

 

[artlessknave]

non-raid pools

this is super easy, since TrueNAS doesn't have RAID at all.

compared to if data gets corrupted in a giant pool

ZFS is specifically designed to not have this. and to report it immediately, so you can deal with ASAP, not "loose sleep over it". a reasonably well planned out ZFS pool is very difficult to corrupt data on. people have tried, specifically, to see what it takes to break a pool, and failed to break it in any meaningful way.

choosing to abandon one of the ZFS *primary features* of self healing by not having at least a mirror pool, you might as well just pick a different NAS solution, because data integrity is clearly not your goal.

mirrors can perform dramatically better than a single disk, especially when you have multiple vdevs per pool.

what I read in this post is a large amount of misunderstanding of what TrueNAS is and how it works.

 

[uberwebguru]

what I read in this post is a large amount of misunderstanding of what TrueNAS is and how it works.

There is no misunderstanding, i know ofcourse about the benefits of better performance with mirrors and all that. I was not aware of the no data corruption test though.

If you read my post, i mentioned reasons like i get to save more hard drive space, the performance i get from a single SSD will be fine. And also with NVMe drives, we both know you dont need no mirrors to get performance out of a single disk. Except if your NAS server will have only 1 single pool of multiple disks, then you will agree that one should create different pools, so for me i ask, why not 1 pool per 1 disk?

That is all. Like i noted also, yeah i now that will be unconventional, and i also acknowledged that this is a use-case thing

 

[ChrisRJ]

What i get with this setup, is decentralization, meaning if 1 disk dies, i dont need to lose sleep, compared to if data gets corrupted in a giant pool, you start to lose sleep.

So you think that, in the spirit of fail fast, problems are more obvious, i.e. the drive fails vs. silently corrupting data? What makes you think that bit rot will not occur on a single-drive pool?

 

[sretalla]

Generally speaking RAID (or RAIDZ or Mirrors in TrueNAS) is working in the direction of reducing/eliminating RTO while keeping RPO at 100%.

If you accept an RTO of 24+ hours and RPO of maybe the same (24 hours of lost data), then your strategy is fine.

 

[uberwebguru]

So you think that, in the spirit of fail fast, problems are more obvious, i.e. the drive fails vs. silently corrupting data? What makes you think that bit rot will not occur on a single-drive pool?

It can happen as well, ofcourse, but i only have to worry about 1 pool of 1 drive to deal with and a sub-section of my overall data, as opposed to 1 giant pool of drives with almost all data in there

 

[uberwebguru]

Generally speaking RAID (or RAIDZ or Mirrors in TrueNAS) is working in the direction of reducing/eliminating RTO while keeping RPO at 100%.

If you accept an RTO of 24+ hours and RPO of maybe the same (24 hours of lost data), then your strategy is fine.

Well with like 10G to 40G network, one can restore data pretty fast, and factor in that these wont be happening too often..lets say like 1 per 5 years...so a downtime of a few hours in 5 years or more for couple TB of data restore is not a bad solution, considering the benefits i mentioned.

Also note that when you tend to scale vertically with storage drives, like 100TB for example, you cant really be doing mirriors, that is like throwing money away. What you can do instead is to do backup, you have to have backup regardless of any vdevs you have in space, so why not use that money for other things.

And you invest in like 100G network when you start to scale that high in storage drives, so you can restore very fast. This solution is not that bad, you guys please admit it!

 

[danb35]

TrueNAS doesn't have RAID at all.

Nonsense; ZFS in most cases is a form of RAID. RAID != hardware RAID.

 

[artlessknave]

hardware RAID

zfs has raidz. so many people confuse how the technologies work and try to use them interchangeably, so I work very hard to differentiate RAID from raidz/RAIDz. it's very possible that the way I do that isnt effective though. in my head, it's as simple as raidz != RAID. maybe I should use that, that might be more clear. hmm.
I find "hardware RAID" is kind of a misnomer; it's just software RAID running on the controller. motherboard RAID, for example, is "hardware RAID" but it usually runs in the CPU.

 

[danb35]

zfs has raidz

It also has mirrors. Both are forms of RAID. "TrueNAS doesn't have RAID" is simply false. It's true that ZFS RAID is different from traditional RAID, but that doesn't make it non-RAID.