RAID-Z1

Craig321 · 26 Jun 2014 at 19:20

Hi

Am I right in saying you can still mix and match drives in RAID-Z1 (with FreeNAS) and that if I put 2x 1.5TB and 2x 2TB in an array I'd get roughly 4.5TB back with a fault tolerance of 1 disk?

Thanks

Frozennova · 27 Jun 2014 at 18:09

Absolutely correct.

zfs creates the array based on the smallest drive, you can down the line swap out the two 1.5tb drives to 2tb drives and increase the array to 6tb

Craig321 · 27 Jun 2014 at 18:23

Cheers

Think I might go for Z2, so sacrifice some space and gain protection. Haven't decided yet! Space or more protection... hmmmm. I will be backing the whole lot up to a big external drive so maybe Z1 is the way to go.

Frozennova · 27 Jun 2014 at 20:45

If you plan on backing up to another drive then Z1 makes more sense. I'm moving away from ZFS over to MDADM for flexibilty as it will allow me to create an array with a 2 drive mirror then add additional drives and expand the array to raid 5 and then eventually raid 6 when I've populated my server with 8 drives

Craig321 · 27 Jun 2014 at 20:48

That's true, it's unlikely that I'll get a complete failure with Z1 and if I did then the most I'd lose is a day or so. Even then, I have CrashPlan for my documents, etc. so wouldn't lose anything major.