Adding RAID long after original install - custom install partition sizes or factory defaults
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I am ready to go ahead with a new install of 24.11 onto a RAID array. The SSD's are (3) 240 Gb Kingston hard drives and the memory is 16226 MiB with 14% currently being used.
The current setup is a single Kingston 110 with 9.40G allocated and 101G free.
I started out assuming, "just use the factory defaults for partition sizes." However since this is a new install what might be the best sizes of partitions starting fresh.
let me know, thank you.
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I would still just use the default sizes. And I'd probably just use two drives in a zfs mirror.
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@stephenw10 I have to say your suggestion is wrecking my plan! But everything you have helped with previously proved reliable.
Would you please, in your understanding why only mirroring with two drives, instead of my three would be best. I tend to like the concept of swapping without shutting down... however how often would I not shut down pfsense to work on the hardware. I also like more redundancy than less - amateur for sure. I mean how bad can it be, "more is better!"
It seems a great deal of disk space is unused because of the efficiency of pfsense. Are there ways to utilize the underutilized space?
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If you have hot-swappable hardware raid then that might be an option. But if you want that level of resilience then you should have an HA pair anyway.
The issue with hardware raid is it often requires additional drivers and can make reinstalling significantly more complex if you need to.
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@stephenw10 Ahhh, so I have a misconception. No, I have no hardware RAID, I assumed my experience with TrueNAS was similar to RAID in FreeBSD - in it was software driven and provided hot swappable capabilities. If this is true - it does not - then yes one of my reasons for RAID with three drives is out the window. Please clarify "HA pair?"
