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Self-made rack mountable NAS - How much storage and witch RAID? (alien.top)
submitted 1 year ago by Ollem-CH@alien.top to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum
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Hi everybody

TL:DR How many drives in which RAID makes sense for a new NAS build?

I hope this is interesting enough for you to read through and to write your opinion.
Thank you in advance.

My Synology NAS has a (1) dead HDD (2 x 4TB) so I have to get a new HDD. While fixing I'd like to upgrade to futureproof but my Syno NAS can't handle more than 4TB per HDD (according to spec).

That's why I'm thinking about a new one but a prebuild is somewhat expensive and I'd like to build the things by myself.
Because I'm rack mounting all new devices, I found a case (Fantec SRC-2012X07) that can hold up to 12 3.5" HDDs. The HDDs in mind are around 12TB, right now I don't have the data to fill even one HDD but as I said, I want to build for the future where we will have even more and bigger data stored.

Right now I backed up data roughly around 4TB, so I think 2x 12TB HDD in RAID 1 would be plenty, I'd prefer a RAID 5 with 3 drives to begin with. But as soon as I want to upgrade the space and add more drives, I need to backup all data before I can wipe the previous RAID and build the new one.

As an example how I understand it:
I have a RAID 1 with 2x 12TB (lets say 10TB in total storage), the space is used with 10TB of data.
To be able to build a RAID 5 with 3 drives I have to backup first those 10TB on another drive an then build the RAID 5 with the 3 drives. That means I need at this point 4 drives.

Is that correct? Is there a better way?

Thanks for reading through and I hope you can write me your opinions about this.

I live in Switzerland and I'm using www.digitec.ch most of the time because they have a pretty good filtering system.

Cheers

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[-] jaskij@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

ZFS is the gold standard. Since it's a dedicated NAS, I'd say just run TrueNAS CORE.

While it's not perfect, vdev expansion was merged recently and will arrive in OpenZFS 2.3

As for how to configure the stuff... Depending on your use case (which you don't explain much) and how often you expand, I'd probably go with just a plain mirror of those 12TB drives. ZFS does allow you to add more vdevs to a pool, so that's a non issue. Once you fill that one mirror, you can add a second mirror, and still have that as a single pool.

[-] Ollem-CH@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Right, I didn't get into detail much but as I wrote my post and as I got feedback, the build and configuration is improving already.
I already use TrueNAS Core on a Server witch I use as my Network storage (NAS) but what I'll probably build is this 12 bay case into 6 HDDs NAS for daily use and 6 HDD backup of the NAS and other data. Both pools built as RAIDZ2 (RAID 6). Then I can use the Server for other things (game server or whatever). But to start I'll think about your suggestion to start with RAIDZ1 (RAID 1) and two disks, if I need to add more, I'll just add another two disks in RAIDZ1 and add them to the same pool.
I'll edit my plan to the end of the post for others easier to find.
Thanks a lot and Cheers

[-] HoustonBOFH@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

More spindles means better performance. But also more power use. Only you can decide which is more important.

[-] Ollem-CH@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

And also means more initial cost to buy drives I don't really need right now.

My worries are to have to backup a pool of, lets say 30TB (I don't know if I every have this many data), and need first a storage solution to upgrade my original storage. But maybe it's better to let my future self to solve this issue.

this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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