Choosing The BEST Drive Layout For Your NAS

I wish I started with fewer, larger drives.

Nice video, mate—very informative! One thing I don’t like about ZFS and RAID-Z is that all disks need to be the same size and once created it's hard to resize by adding additional drive (Let's say in case of RAID-Z1 you have a 3 disks and want to add another one because you slowly ran out of space). Personally, I prefer using software RAID (like RAID 5 or 6) along with LVM, which I think offers more flexibility when dealing with disks of different sizes and configurations and dynamic reconfiguration in case of physical drives reconfiguration. You can assign your logical volumes to specific physical volumes based on the desired resilience or speed. Synology uses a similar approach with their SHR. Guys what do you think?

I have 5 x 4tb and 5 x 2tb hard drive, and using unraid with 2 drive as parity drive. And keep a spare 4tb hard drive.

I have 8 bay naz, 12 TB zfs raid z2. Its my plex server. LOL

Doris Spurs

Russel Locks

Rosemarie Radial

Merritt Place

I use to large drives for daily stuff in raid 1. For all other stationary files with snapraid. Snapraid controls 6 drives. With snapraid I can mix new old large small drives. I backup raid 1 stuff into snapraid as well in addition external drives. Zfs is just too restrictive and not cost effactive..

Jackeline Course

You can run out of space quick if you're not careful. My NAS has a total of 26TB in a pool. In 4 years I've accumulated 76% of that space with 6.1TB remaining. Mostly due to media server, music server, photos, & family videos. So I'm looking at an expansion of a 2nd pool next year with a capacity of 38TB which will give me a total of 64TB which will be more than enough for the next 10 years I hope. I'm using a RAID-5 configuration.

Raid 60 is my preference with a 12 disk pool per raid 6 array (2x parity).

Two drives in a mirror set should be enough for the storage needs of most people. An external HDD for on-site backup and one offsite backup destination. A proper version control and rotation system and your data will be safe.

I have been thinking about this exact thing for my first at home server setup. I am repurposing a 3770k build from back in the day, looking at getting four 12tb drives for storage while downclocking the cpu and undervolting/underclocking gpu for power efficiency since that old of a chip doesn't have quicksync... Based on what you've shown, it seems like raid 5 may be the ticket for me :)

Towne Parkways

how raidz1 is covering drive fails? I don't understand. How can it save 3tb of data if it's only 1tb.

I have SSDs in my home NAS

Great video! My NAS is in development. Making choices trying programs, eventually a backup for photos and streaming media. I was aiming for a low power build, and started with the ASRock N100M with a HBA running @50% due to pcie constraints. So I net 6 drivers one of which is the SSD on the motherboard. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Strosin Rue

Karine Isle

Eliza Camp

Botsford Knolls

Resilience and redundancy are not the same thing.

Hoeger Brook

Kub Plains

Meaghan Wells

Rowan Forks

Tyrel Light

Ashly Fork

Zena Forest

Mitchell Flat

Marjolaine Hill

Legros Loop

Weston Loaf

Presley Mill

Sawayn Park

Frank Track

Beahan Village

Bonnie Cove

Mraz Stravenue

Stracke Courts

9481 Keegan Row

Why no raidz3 in the 8-drive-configuration?

Most eye-popping part of this video (and I appreciate this so much) was the part about wattage and pricing on electricity. Thanks for that pro-tip because I've been obsessing over larger drives. Does the pricing principal/outcome differ with SSDs?

about your questions in the intro. 6 to 8 drives in a striped mirror is something i prefer. i use normally normal sata hard drives but using a proper raid controller with its features.
i buy the cheapest drives i can find to match my targeted capacity. i match my lowest drive data speed to the speed of my Ethernet connection.
in my case i have a old 3,5 inch drive 12 bay server with a single 6 core xeon with a sata raid controller. it is sata not sas. the server has 4 port 10gbit nic and i have a in my pc an 5gbit nic so 5gbit is the minimum speed i try to reach. i use 8 drives at the moment and typical a hdd reaches 80-160 MB/s.
i could use ssd but i use the in ubuntu build in ssh/sftp file transfer and because how the file-transfer works, i dont expect multiple random access it is only one file transferred at the time.
i use this method because it works seamlessly in the file manager so i have no need for SMB or something similar. in fact all of my servers and computer running on ubuntu.
i dont have other systems that are connected to the same NAS besides my phone or tv but then i use the plex media service i have installed for music and video.
the tv uses a 1gbit connection but cant use it at full speed for some reason it is only able of 80mbs and my wifi to my phone is only 2.4Ghz. so yea my pc is the fastest device in my network and my servers dont share a constantly connection between them only for backups. in theory i am able to take advantage of 10gbit but at the moment it is only used between the servers for a backup.

i have connected 2 of the 10gbit Ethernet ports to my switch in case i want to upgrade but for now it is fast enough. also 10gbit stuff is expensive

I'm starting from square one with learning how to build a NAS that I ultimately want to run PLEX on. Starting out small with what I already have, so I have three 1TB SATA SSDs and a 1TB external SSD that I'm not even sure if I can use, and a 500GB SSD that I plan to use as the primary drive for the OS and any extra gobbeldegook.

A question I have is would it even be possible to use the external SSD in RAIDZ1 with the internal drives, or would I be outtta luck on that option? An extra terabyte of storage would be nice with starting at this low level.