Luis - FreeNAS Setup

Hello, Kris and Allan. Long time TechSNAP listener. Allan introduced me to BSD in TechSNAP and a few months ago I started listenning to BSDnow and went back to entire catalog. Now I'm hooked in this podcast too.



I assembled a freeNAS box. My case has 16 3.5' HD slots (it has 4 horizontal boards with 1 sff-8087 plug each and connects a 4 disk hot-plug row) so I bought 2 PCIe LSI LSI00301 8 Port 6Gbps SAS 9207-8i SGL PCI-E Host Bus Adaptor that have 2 SFF-8087 connectors so I can plug up to 4x2 HD's each. I also bought 4 3TB WD red so I have the first case full row completed and created a pool with the 4 drives in raidz2. I have not put it in production so I have no data, no jails, no users and no plugins on my machine yet. It's only running the freeNAS OS. My goal is to run windows shares and network backup for my company and also install a few services (from plugin page, I cannot do it from the CLI) like owncloud, BTsync or crashplan in our LAN.



Here are my questions:



1. if the LSI HBA card fails do I loose data? or the machine will just stop working? should I have an extra card laying around?

2. how do I make backups from this machine? when it will be full i'll have 4 raidz2 groups (3 TB per disk minimum) and so no external hard drive i know will have that much storage

3. should every 4 disks group I add be in a column (in the case) so each vdev I add to the pool has 1 disk from each of the ports on each of the LSI HBA?

4. I've read that I should have 1 or 2 SSD's for ZIL and ARC. What is this for and will I need this? The motherboard has 6 SATA connectos and I'm only using 1 (for the dvd), should I can use any of these SATA and install the OS on a SSD (or mirror SSD) since I have 4 or 6 new 30 GB drives instead of using a USB thumb drive?