Which RAID options are available right now?

[Flyboy]

I realize this may be a dumb question, but I am a noob and trying to learn as this will be my first NAS, mostly for keeping family memorials and import docs safe, but also one day figuring out how to run a media server.

I received and invite to Hex OS back in December, but with Christmas, new years and personal matters I am finally getting around to spec'ing out and buying the parts for my system, and have not even downloaded it. Are there options now to be able to choose which RAID configuration Hex will run? I remember watching several youtube videos around launch and it seemed like there were very few options on choosing RAID options?

 

I am just now learning about RAID, but Ideally I think I am going with 3 or 4 drives and will probably be running RAID 5 or 6 from what I understand about them.  I am trying to figure out what size HDDs I need to buy and want to make sure I have enough room for whatever the options are for Hex OS. Thanks in advance. Sorry if this is a simple question.

 

This is all I had seen in some of the launch videos, but I wasnt sure what RAID those were.

[Mobius]

Hexos doesn't support raid 5 or raid 6

They have similar layouts called raid z1 and z2 respectively.

Z1 sets sides 1 drive of storage for parity and z2 sets aside 2 drives of storage for parity.

There is also raid mirror which is limited to 2 drives. 

 

My suggestion is always decide if you want 1 or 2 drives of parity first. 

If you want 1 drive of parity, buy the largest 3 hdds that make financial sense for you. 

If you want 2 drive of parity, buy the largest 4 hdds that make financial sense for you.

This is so you can expand your pool later if you want to

 

The more hdds you have the more you'll end up paying in electricity costs in the long run and it does add up. Plus there is a limit to have many drive bays we have access to. 

 

Final note raid z2 needs to be configured in truenas but should not cause issues in hexos

[Mobius]

39 minutes ago, cautionchicken said:

Any guide available for me ot follow? I went into truenas and made a raid z2 to give it a try and then it wouldn't let me download any apps, because I think it was looking to install to a pool named HDDs.  I also added an SSD cache. I tried deleting the Pool, and creating it again named HDDs but now the SSD cache has a partition error and I cant recreate the pool with the cache. 

Any thoughts or advice? I know having a Cache is not mission critical, but I thought it would help a bit with plex.

Ssd cache isn't really worth it since truenas does really use it as how you would expect it to.

 

You will likely need to erase your drives using the guide i made

Now to get one click app installs to work again you need to set your pool as the apps pool in truenas. I forget exactly how to do it but if you explore truenas or search the forum you might find it. Someone else might also reply with it below

 

[Sonic]

There are no dumb questions. Just ask questions and learn. HexOS uses ZFS as file system. HexOS creates raidz1 pool if you have more then 3 drives. (One drive can fail). Raidz2 can not be created by HexOs yet ( two drives can fail), but you can in Truenas.

with 2 drives a ZFS mirror is created. (One drive can fail).

If you want to learn more about this topic, you can use google and search for ZFS vs Raid

[Flyboy]

26 minutes ago, Mobius said:

Hexos does support raid 5 or raid 6

They have similar layouts called raid z1 and z2 respectively.

Z1 sets sides 1 drive of storage for parity and z2 sets aside 2 drives of storage for parity.

There is also raid mirror which is limited to 2 drives. 

 

My suggestion is always decide if you want 1 or 2 drives of parity first. 

If you want 1 drive of parity, buy the largest 3 hdds that make financial sense for you. 

If you want 2 drive of parity, buy the largest 4 hdds that make financial sense for you.

This is so you can expand your pool later if you want to

 

The more hdds you have the more you'll end up paying in electricity costs in the long run and it does add up. Plus there is a limit to have many drive bays we have access to. 

 

Final note raid z2 needs to be configured in truenas but should not cause issues in hexos

Ah, Thank you very much both Sonic and Mobius. I had heard of ZFS before, but didnt realize that was different than raid. I just looked it up and read bit so I appreciate letting me know the difference.

Thanks for letting me know the difference between Raid z1 and Raid z2 also. I hadnt really thought about electricity costs before, but great to think about now. I certainly had been planning on getting at least 3 drives as I wanted to ability to upgrade in the future.

 

Thanks again!

[Dylan]

2 hours ago, Mobius said:

Hexos does support raid 5 or raid 6

I'd be careful as HexOS/ZFS does not support RAID5/6 even with your qualifiers below, Not trying to be pedantic, just recommend using clear verbiage - otherwise great feedback @Mobius!

[Mobius]

@Dylan whoops i meant doesn't support it
after a concussion a few years ago, the words i think in my head does not adequately get transmitted to my fingers

good catch

[Dylan]

21 hours ago, Mobius said:

@Dylan whoops i meant doesn't support it
after a concussion a few years ago, the words i think in my head does not adequately get transmitted to my fingers

good catch

All good homie!

[L-P]

I need my pool to be RAIDZ2, but RAIDZ1 seems to be the only option in HexOS... Someone suggested setting RAIDZ2 in TrueNas; can this break anything in HexOS, it's safe?

I need really fast read/write speed and redundancy because I'm video editing directly on my NAS. I'm even considering RAIDZ3. Can someone tell me the best way to go about this?

At the moment, I only populated 6x 20TB SAS drives in a RAIDZ1 pool.

Edited February 1 by L-P

[Mobius]

7 hours ago, L-P said:

I need my pool to be RAIDZ2, but RAIDZ1 seems to be the only option in HexOS... Someone suggested setting RAIDZ2 in TrueNas; can this break anything in HexOS, it's safe?

I need really fast read/write speed and redundancy because I'm video editing directly on my NAS. I'm even considering RAIDZ3. Can someone tell me the best way to go about this?

At the moment, I only populated 6x 20TB SAS drives in a RAIDZ1 pool.

I believe some users reported using raid z2 without any issues.
If you want speed you may wanna 2 or 3 raid z1 vdevs combined into 1 pool. As far as i know raid z1 gives you the performance of a single drive however for every vdev you have the performance increases ergo
3 mirror vdevs will have the performance of 3 drives 
2 z1 vdevs of 3 drives each will have the performance of 2 drives.

[PsychoWards]

I'm using a RaidZ2 without any issues, but I'm also not using any of the apps, since I'm running an Ubuntu VM with docker for all my apps. I didn't follow all the discussions but it seems that destroying the first pool created results in apps become unusable until some paths/settings are fixed in TrueNas, but don't quote me on that, maybe someone else has more information about this.

To add to @Mobius explanations about the Vdevs:

Once you loose all the drives from 1 vdev you loose everything. Meaning with 3x2 drive vdevs you can only loose 1 drive per vdev (but 3 drives in total if they are all from different vdevs) and with 2x3 drive vdevs you can loose 2 drives per vdev without loosing any data.

@L-Pif you have 10 gbit/s networking, you might want to look into adding an nvme cache drive as an L2ARC. ARC is a read only cache, which is keeping the files which you might need next in a cache in memory for quick access. You can extend this with an L2ARC cache which, stores additional files on a dedicated drive. If this drive is an SSD it's gonna ready and serve those files significantly faster then if Hexos needed to read them from the slow HDDs. This might make sense in your case if you have 10gbit/s networking, everything below and the speed benefits are likely to be marginal at best.

And no there is no write cache in Hexos only a read cache. 🙂 

[Racer X]

On 2/1/2025 at 10:23 AM, L-P said:

I need my pool to be RAIDZ2, but RAIDZ1 seems to be the only option in HexOS... Someone suggested setting RAIDZ2 in TrueNas; can this break anything in HexOS, it's safe?

I need really fast read/write speed and redundancy because I'm video editing directly on my NAS. I'm even considering RAIDZ3. Can someone tell me the best way to go about this?

At the moment, I only populated 6x 20TB SAS drives in a RAIDZ1 pool.

It's my understanding you set it up once, which will auto setup for you in Z1, but then (before adding data), you delete that pool and then re-setup in Z2 (RAID 6 if you will).  Hope that helps.

[L-P]

21 hours ago, Racer X said:

It's my understanding you set it up once, which will auto setup for you in Z1, but then (before adding data), you delete that pool and then re-setup in Z2 (RAID 6 if you will).  Hope that helps.

Thanks, now I feel confident to setup Z2 in TrueNas without breaking anything in HexOS.

[cautionchicken]

On 2/3/2025 at 1:57 PM, L-P said:

Thanks, now I feel confident to setup Z2 in TrueNas without breaking anything in HexOS.

Any guide available for me ot follow? I went into truenas and made a raid z2 to give it a try and then it wouldn't let me download any apps, because I think it was looking to install to a pool named HDDs.  I also added an SSD cache. I tried deleting the Pool, and creating it again named HDDs but now the SSD cache has a partition error and I cant recreate the pool with the cache. 

Any thoughts or advice? I know having a Cache is not mission critical, but I thought it would help a bit with plex.

[cautionchicken]

18 minutes ago, Mobius said:

Ssd cache isn't really worth it since truenas does really use it as how you would expect it to.

 

You will likely need to erase your drives using the guide i made

Now to get one click app installs to work again you need to set your pool as the apps pool in truenas. I forget exactly how to do it but if you explore truenas or search the forum you might find it. Someone else might also reply with it below

 

I was able to use secure erase on the SSD in the Motherboard BIOS. Raid Z2 pool created in Truenas menu and named HDDs works for installing apps. Thank you.

[Mobius]

3 minutes ago, cautionchicken said:

I was able to use secure erase on the SSD in the Motherboard BIOS. Raid Z2 pool created in Truenas menu and named HDDs works for installing apps. Thank you.

Glad you got everything working

[cautionchicken]

The only extra step was going back into Truenas and trying to install Plex there and it asked which pool for the application folder, I left the install and then the apps installed successfully

.

[Racer X]

I also saw this approach on YouTube that seemed to work as well.  Maybe this content creator can help you?  

 

[StephenMF]

Follow up question.
Is it possible to mix different sizes of HDs in the RAIDz1 configuration?
I am coming from Unraid, and it's easy to move around the different HDs - upgrade you parity drive and add a small new drive and so on...

Is it similar in HexOS?
Or are you more locked in the?

[Mobius]

8 minutes ago, StephenMF said:

Follow up question.
Is it possible to mix different sizes of HDs in the RAIDz1 configuration?
I am coming from Unraid, and it's easy to move around the different HDs - upgrade you parity drive and add a small new drive and so on...

Is it similar in HexOS?
Or are you more locked in the?

You can mix drive sizes but every drive in a raid pool will be treated as if they are the same size as the smallest drive (mixed size z1 pool will have to be done via the true nas interface) 

You cannot add a smaller drive to a raidZ pool later, same size or larger only. 

You also cannot turn a z1 pool into a z2 pool. 

Only "freedom" we have us slowly replacing every drive with a bigger one, once every drive is replaced the system should automatically increase the size of the pool. 

We pretty much have the same capabilities as truenas scale

[StephenMF]

15 minutes ago, Mobius said:

You can mix drive sizes but every drive in a raid pool will be treated as if they are the same size as the smallest drive (mixed size z1 pool will have to be done via the true nas interface)

You cannot add a smaller drive to a raidZ pool later, same size or larger only.

You also cannot turn a z1 pool into a z2 pool.

Only "freedom" we have us slowly replacing every drive with a bigger one, once every drive is replaced the system should automatically increase the size of the pool.

We pretty much have the same capabilities as truenas scale

ouch...

That was one of the biggest reasons for choosing Unraid years ago.

[Mobius]

12 minutes ago, StephenMF said:

ouch...

That was one of the biggest reasons for choosing Unraid years ago.

i think a lot of users would like that feature. Fingers crossed we get something like that in the future