NAS Build 2.0?
So I built a new temporary NAS out of an old PowerEdge 2950 G3 I had in my recycle pile, a HBA with external ports, and a 15 bay external drive enclosure. This seems to have resolved the issue I was having with FreeNAS dropping the WD Red pool, even if I haven’t pinpointed the exact cause. At some point I would like to replace the 2950 as it is a bit of a potential bottleneck, and the upgradability is limited (I upgraded it to 40 GB of RAM, but the system maxes at 64). Plus, the drives installed in the system are all run through the onboard RAID controller as single-disk RAID 0s which is less than desirable. As that pool contains my VMs I’ll need to move them elsewhere before I replace the box. I was looking at adding to the WD Red pool but the matching drives aren’t built for a more than 8 drive use case, and the ones that are don’t come in 3TB. So I’m looking at other options as well, considering building a new 5 disk pool with larger drives, and adding additional 5 disk vdevs later. But for the moment this will all have to remain hypothetical, hopefully drive prices come down further.