Will it be good idea if I put FreeNAS on raid 1 ?

[bhabanisankardas007]

Hi,

I want to use 2 (80 GB) 7200 rpm drives with raid 1 configuration for FreeNAS (in future if FreeNAS require update).

Will it be good idea to choose these drives / a single USB drive will be enough ?

Any help would be appreciate.

Thanks.

 

[Solandri]

If you mean the data drives, bad idea. FreeNAS is based on ZFS, which is better than RAID. Set up a zvol (ZFS volume) with one disk redundancy, and you'll have all the benefits of RAID 1, plus all the benefits of ZFS. If you have more than 2 drives, it will work similarly to RAID 5. The volumes are independent of your ZFS installation. As long as your remember your volume configuration (write it down somewhere, though in your case it's pretty simple), you can restore access by transferring the data drives to any other FreeNAS installation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

If you mean drives for the installation of FreeNAS itself, I suppose you could if you require 100% uptime. However, the installation is small enough (fits on a 8GB flash drive) that you could simply install it, then duplicate it to a second flash drive. Toss that second drive in a drawer somewhere (refresh it every few months). If the main boot flash drive should ever fail, just use the one in your drawer instead.

 

[mdd1963]

you can connect two flash drives, and mirror them on the install quite easily....as long as one works, booting up is pretty certain.....

No need to waste SSDs (and SATA ports) on boot media for what is a mostly memory resident OS...; save the SATA ports for drive pools.