I'll be recieving a LincStation N2 shortly and I want to use it to store my games and my files externaly to my main PC. So I think I'm looking for the best read and or write performance out there. I have a 10 gig NIC in my PC and also a 10gig swith.

I was thinking of using ZFS and stripping 4 NVMe SSD's and then mirror that pool with 2 SATA SSD's for some redudancy (and increased read speed?).

 

Is that a possible setup or am I missing things? If it's possible, how do I choose the sizes of my drives, do both pools (NVMe pool and SATA pool) need to be equal in size?

 

Thanks in advance

17 hours ago, CyborgNinja said:

Is that a possible setup or am I missing things?

It is.

 

17 hours ago, CyborgNinja said:

how do I choose the sizes of my drives

The devices for each pool should all be the same capacity, but not needed that both pools use the same.

So if I understand it correctly I can for example use all 2TB drives? So 4x2TB NMVe and 2x2TB SATA to mirror? Or would it need to be 2x4TB, so both pools have the same size?

 

And for set up, what would be the easiest way? I have used unraid before for media storage but only in the classic unraid way with parity and normal drives.

I'm new to ZFS...

7 minutes ago, CyborgNinja said:

Or would it need to be 2x4TB, so both pools have the same size?

Each pool is independent of the others so set them how you want.

 

With Unraid 7 the classic array can be considered though it was just another pool type.  It is not yet called that although I would not be surprised if they change the nomenclature when/if multiple Unraid type arrays are supported.

Sorry I'm still a bit confused here...

To be clear I want the SATA SSD pool to mirror the NVMe striped pool for redundancy and some increased read performance.

So both pools don't need to be exact size even though one is a mirror of the other?

 

And is there some sort of guide how I could set that up with zfs? Because I haven't found a set up like like that yet...

 

Thank you for being patient with me. 😅

7 hours ago, CyborgNinja said:

So both pools don't need to be exact size even though one is a mirror of the other?

No, the original pool can be smaller, and will still fit on the other one.

 

7 hours ago, CyborgNinja said:

And is there some sort of guide how I could set that up with zfs?

Just need to add a pool and set the filesystem to zfs, also choose the layout you want at that time.

As a follow up I finally have all the hardware now...

But i'm still struggling to set it up properly. I've been looking around alot but no luck...

I added a screenshot of my setup that I want to get working, the pool names say it all, I want the SATA SSD's to mirror the NVME's

There's no data yet on the array, so I can still do anything with it.

5 hours ago, CyborgNinja said:

I want the SATA SSD's to mirror the NVME's

There's no way to do that using the GUI, unless you add them all to the same pool, for two separate pools, would need a script or similar.

45 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

There's no way to do that using the GUI, unless you add them all to the same pool, for two separate pools, would need a script or similar.

So sad, I'm willing to use some sort of script to get it working, but I have no idea how to start that.

You can use a simple rsync script with the user script plugin, or for example:

Ok thank you, I will have a look into that.

Just out of curiosity, how would that work in 1 pool?

Would that be some sort of a raidz2 setup? I thought you couldn't use different drives for 1 pool, why I thought a setup like this requires 2 separate pools because of the difference in disk sizes.

Btw, I've also setup an ISCSI target on the "main-storage" pool and I like the performance of that striped pool, just need to make it redundant somehow...

1 hour ago, CyborgNinja said:

Just out of curiosity, how would that work in 1 pool?

You could create a single pool with striped mirrors using all the devices, of course, it would be just one pool, i.e., if the pool gets hosed, all data would be lost.

9 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

You could create a single pool with striped mirrors using all the devices, of course, it would be just one pool, i.e., if the pool gets hosed, all data would be lost.

Ah I see.

That's not really an option, even though it's primarily a game library and some mod files and spreadsheets.

It would be a bad time to have to rework everything...

I see the rsync path doesn't require my pools to be exact the same, because it's just a backup. So I could I could mirror both SATA SSD's. For more redundancy on that part.

Am I correct in assuming I can then use that back up data to rebuild my striped array if 1 drive or several fail?

13 minutes ago, CyborgNinja said:

Am I correct in assuming I can then use that back up data to rebuild my striped array if 1 drive or several fail?

Yep

6 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

Yep

Thank you for your assistance, you're legend.

I will check rsync later today. 👍