pool with large number of disks some advice please

[bbrodka]

I had the opportunity to purchase 46 very old, but still working  Dell 4CMD9 Constellation ST3000NM0023 3TB 7.2k SAS Hard Drives for $260  shipped.  Now normally, I wouldn't mess with such small drives, but for $260, well its hard to turn down and I won't cry over losing $5.60 drives over time lol

 

I already have a 45 bay Super micro sas2 enclosure sitting unused,  so lets fill it up.

 

Anyway, this is mostly an experiment with zfs for me, no critical data, or frequently accessed data will be stored on this pool but I would like to try to not totally loose the pool due to the eventual and possibly frequent drive failures.

 

My thought is to set up 5 - 9 disk wide raid-z2 pools with one hot spare (in another enclosure) to maximize storage with a reasonable amount of fault tolerance.

Does this sound like a good plan?

 

Additionally I have  4 HITACHI HUSMH842 CLAR200 200gb SSDs laying around that I was considering adding to this pool as a special vdev in a 3 way mirror in my main sas3 enclosure holding one as a cold spare.  But I'm unsure is 200gb would be large enough for this pool.   

 

And 3rd I have a 2tb pci4 name on this system I thought of trying to use as a l2arc cache for this pool, not so much for performance, but as an attempt to keep this pool spun down as much as possible. (it will mostly be hosting a very large hyper spin retro game collection, with infrequent use and hoping most used files wind up on l2arc)

 

Does this seem like a good plan?

 

I'm trying to avoid that "I should of done it another way" feeling as I learn and experiment.

 

Does anyone have any recommendations and comments welcome

 

Thanks in advance.

 

 

 

 

 

[JorgeB]

38 minutes ago, bbrodka said:

My thought is to set up 5 - 9 disk wide raid-z2 pools with one hot spare (in another enclosure) to maximize storage with a reasonable amount of fault tolerance.

Does this sound like a good plan?

Sounds OK to me, since the disks are not very large I would have no issues making 9 wide raidz2 vdevs.

 

38 minutes ago, bbrodka said:

But I'm unsure is 200gb would be large enough for this pool. 

Should be more than enough, as long as the data is not extremely metadata heavy, like a lot of small files, this is from one of my pools (3.2GB of metadata for 40TB of data, but they are 99% large media files)

 

 

43 minutes ago, bbrodka said:

And 3rd I have a 2tb pci4 name on this system I thought of trying to use as a l2arc cache for this pool, not so much for performance, but as an attempt to keep this pool spun down as much as possible. (it will mostly be hosting a very large hyper spin retro game collection, with infrequent use and hoping most used files wind up on l2arc)

Special vdev will already help with spin down, since you can browse the folders without spinning up the disks, the L2ARC might help if the data you use is not always different, i.e., that it can be and stay cached.