Hive

Overview

FreeNAS provides storage via Pools. A pool is a bunch of raw drives gathered and managed as a set. My pools are one of these:

• single drive: no FreeNAS advantage other than health checks
• raid1 pair: mirrored drives give normal write speeds, fast reads, single-fail redundancy, costs half of storage potential
• raid0 pair: striped drives gives fast writes, normal reads, no redundancy, no storage cost
• raid of multiple drives: FreeNAS optimization of read/write speed, redundancy, storage potential

The three levels of raid are:

• raidz: one drive is consumed just for parity (no data storage, ie you only get (n-1) storage total), and one drive can be lost without losing any data; fastest
• raidz2: two drives for parity, two can be lost
• raidz3: three drives for parity, three can be lost; slowest

Hardware

• Drives

Pool	Capacity	Type	Drives
sassy	0.2 TB	single	250GB ssd
splat	3.6 TB	raid0	1.82 TB hdd x2
mack	0.9 TB	single	1 TB ssd
reservoir	2.7 TB	single	2.73 TB hdd
grim	7.2 TB	raid0	3.64 TB ssd x2
newbee	6 TB	raidz	1 TB ssd x7

• LSI 8-drive SAS board passed through proxmox to hive as "PCI Device":

• 7 1 TB Crucial SSDs

Plugged in to SATA 1, 2, 3 and U.2 1, 2, 3, 4. NOTE: to get U.2 drives to be recognized by Melange ASUS mobo required a BIOS change:

Bios > advanced > onboard devices config > U.2 mode (bottom) > SATA (NOT PCI-E)

Hive history