XigmaNAS

Hi!

I'm currently setting up my NAS with 3x 1.5TB HDD and ZFS.
I wonder what is better:
combining all 3 disks in 1 stripping vdev and create a pool with 1 vdev or
have 3 vdev with 1 disk each and combine them in a pool.

What are the advantages/disadvantages of both options?

I think i'll loose the pool with both options if one disk has a failure. I have a backup, so that's not the part here.

Regards, Chris

neither is a good option.

in both scenarios if one drive fails you loos all your data.
you also lose all the advantages of zfs.

whats your reason for wanting to do this?

at the moment I only have the 3 1.5TB disks and don't have space for a 4th in my rack. I need mor than 3TB, so a raid 5 doesn't work for me.
All data is backed up on external disks, so the data is save.

Until now I had 3 separate NTFS drives in a windows server and now changed to NAS4Free.

So my options are either using the 3 disks separately with UFS or ZFS or combining them in a ZFS pool.

As written I know the risk of loosing all data if one disk fails.

I havent' found anything about the differences of combining the disk on the different levels (vdev or pool), so I'm asking here.

striping will increase read and write performance as the data is distributed across all 3 discs.

with 3 vdev write will only be on one vdev at a time, so you only get the performance of one drive.

since zfs was not designed with extending existing vdevs in my you might want to have a look at unraid.
it gives you better options for using cheap rigs when money is tight and you want to expand the existing rig in the future.
you can use drives of different capacity and you can add a parity drive later.

Thanks for your help!
I've looked at unRAID, which looks also interesting. Anyway, it needs a parity disk, which should be as large as possible to not limit future disk expansion. at the moment, I need all available data space of my disks for storage.

I now understand that adding new disk to vdev is not possible. I have all disks populated with data and NTFS formated. As I want to avoid situation where I have the data only on my backup disk without any copy, I need to add one drive (empty), copy data from another drive and then format the second drive with new file system and add it to the server.
Therefore I need to use either 3 vdev in a pool or have 3 separate disks with UFS.
At the moment, I dont' have explicit need for combining all drives. I just thought it would be a nice option.