Raid

I have a Zotac behind my TV running Eden Beta 3 and a homebuilt tower in a separate room hosting the files, both on Windows 7 x64. The server is running RAID 10 4x 2TB drives as 1 GPT partition on an AMD 990FX motherboard (onboard RAID).

OK here's a question. If I want to switch to ZFS, can I break my RAID 10 and not lose data since the same data is on 2 drives or doesn't it work that way? That way, I could format 2 of the drives ZFS, move the data over, and format the other 2. Too much to hope for?

I'd guess in theory, and most likely practice, yes.

Rebuilding the array may take a lot of time though, wouldn't surprise me if we're talking 10-20 hours or so.

Is ZFS that much of a big deal that it's worth my time to tackle this?

OK I'm reading about ZFS on Wikipedia and it looks like there is no Windows variant, so guess I would be installing Ubuntu on the server...

Well I downloaded FreeNAS so here's what I'm going to do. Backup all my media yo my main PC across the network, probably fastest. Then go into BIOS and break up by hardware RAID. Then take a deep breath and install FreeNAS and see where it takes me. Should I do a RAID5 for my 4 2TB drives?

Normally your LSI controller is the fastest and best choice IF you have drives that support raid5. Your drives do not, so in that case softraid is a better choice.
The onboard raid you have on the mainboard is the worst choice in ANY scenario. It works, but slow as hell.
WIndows Softraid is more mature than it was before, but still I wouldn't want my data relying on windows softraid...

FreeNAS is a very good choice if you start using ZFS. It's very easy to understand, has an intuitive interface and gives you most advantages of ZFS. It however uses quite an old version of ZFS, but you shouldn'r really experience too much of that in normal use.

If you go for ZFS make sure to use version 8.x of FreeNAS. Version 7 has more features but uses a buggy version of ZFS.

ZFS raidz works basically indentical to raid5, zo 2 drives won't work.. at least 3...
for your 4 drives i'd use raidz so that will give you 6TB of space...

For ideal ZFS i recommend buying another drive. The "sweetspot" in numbers of drives for ZFS are 4 and 8 drives plus the parity drives,
so that would mean 4+1=5 drives for raidz (raid5) or 4+2=6 drives for Raidz2 (raid6)....
or 8+1, 8+2 (9 and 10 drives) for raidz and raidz2....
This has to do with stripe sizes being cut... quite technical....

Thanks for everything Gollum. I downloaded unRAID last night and it booted it and itgoes to a command prompt. The last thing I want to do is manage my array with command prompts. So, I upgraded my drives to 4x 3TB drives and you say 1 more would hit the "sweet spot"?. I suppose if I do it now, I'll have 9TB available, if I buy another drive then 12, correct?

Does the raid system follow conventional limitation in that they all need to identical sized drives? I'll now have 4 extra 2TB drives so could I use 2 of those for my pairty or doesn't it work that way?

patseguin Wrote:Thanks for everything Gollum. I downloaded unRAID last night and it booted it and itgoes to a command prompt.

Dude, you're really wasting time by not taking time to think and look for information.

Sure, unRAID probably boots into a command line environment, but so does FreeNAS. If you'd just taken the time to go to the Wiki or forums you would have noticed that there is a web based GUI from which you perform most settings after some minor initial command prompt things, such as setting the host name of the build and/or just figuring out the IP of the host so that you know what to type into you browser for further config.

When I installed my FreeNAS, I just sat down with an install guide, followed it to the letter during the short command line process needed and then it was all via the browser based GUI. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.

Well that was the thing with unRAID (which is my 1st choice) was that there was no installation documentation. I put everything on the flash drive and made it bootable and then was at a command prompt. I found some forum posts but is that really the way I should go about it, especially if I purchase the product? I expected that it would boot into a GUI which would allow me to set up and configure my drives.