For the past 4+ years, I have maintained a home server, running various versions of FreeNAS. This itself was a replacement for a cobbled together and informal version, until I opted to build a dedicated system, roughly 2015. Combined total, I managed to squeeze out about 15 TB of storage, using a variety of shucked drives and new drives – 4x 4 TB and 3x 3 TB in a pair of Raid-Z1 vdevs (two large volumes with a single failure drive for both sets).
These drives, using Western Digital Red drives, have been very reliable. To date, I have not had a problem or issue with a single drive, and several have been running for 7+ years. Overall, quite satisfied.
However, the storage space itself has been running out for quite some time – the media library and my editing needs have continued to grow, but I have not been able to really scale the environment.
At this point however, I am taking the next step, and replacing the drives with a single Raid-Z1 vdev running 8 TB drives, for a target storage of 56 TB of storage (minus some overhead). The rest of the system will remain the same – the cpu although older is still plenty powerful for the needs. The memory is a bit low for FreeNAS with only 16 GB, but that is something that can be easily upgraded later if needed.
As a side improvement, I am finally getting around to replacing the USB drive OS partition with a mirrored set of small SSDs – over the years I have lost the USB drive several times due to hardware issues. There is no expected improvement in speed, but the reliability will hopefully be significantly better.
