Storage Strategy

Created: 10 Sep 2025

This section describes my strategy for my data storage at home given that we have a few terabytes of data.

Current Setup

As of Sep 2025, we have about 4.8TB of data, the bulk of which is for movies or TV shows that we watch. Our personal data is around 1.6TB. All of that is stored in a 4 disk x 2.7TB RaidZ1 configuration on a ProBox 4 bay hard disk enclosure.

The total zpool size is 10.9TB. Given that we should only use about 70% of the storage, the usable zpool size is really just 7.66TB. So, currently, we are using about 60% of the storage we have, and that’s just cool. It just leave us about 2.85TB of space, which is quite all right for the time being. We don’t really need to worry about our space at the moment.

Backup

Currently, the backup for this data is spread across my desktop and a 2.5” portable WD P10 hard drive, which is 4.7TB. Both do not completely cater for the 4.81TB that I have. But at least, all my personal data is backed up.

To me, having a full backup is my most important concern, in the event that the RaidZ isn’t available. So, I decided I had to have a big hard disk that has a full backup of all my data without any raid, so that we don’t have any dependency of other disks. Given the slowness of the 2.5” drive, I decided to go with a 3.5” size hard disk sitting on another good hard disk enclosure, which could take other disks if needed.

So, I’ve bought a Orico 4 bay DAS (S$190) and a 14TB Seagate IronWolf Pro (S$332). I’ve already got the DAS, which currently houses a 1TB spare drive I have. As of 10 Sep 2025, the 14TB drive is making its way from China to Singapore and I should get it in time for the weekend, hopefully. It would be housed in the DAS and will have a simple single ZFS striped VDEV storage.

The other thing that I’ve decided to do with this backup is to only update every weekend. When its not in use, I would export this ZFS pool so that it is on hot standby, unmounted and using idle power. This allows me to not fiddle around with pulling it in and out of the DAS housing and easily doing a weekly rsync.

The ORICO DAS is hosted on my Linux box, while the main ProBox is hosted on my FreeBSD box, which gives me some level of diversity and redundancy.

Encryption

I’ve also decided that this dataset on this 14TB zpool would have default encryption and compression enabled. It was only in the last few weeks that I started learning on ZFS encryption and realised how practical it was that I could leave it unloaded till I provided a password.

I’m quite happy with the fact that ZFS has done encryption on the dataset level, instead of the zpool or device level. What this allows me to do on my desktop or laptop is to boot into a fully working OS with my home directory already mounted, but My Documents folder not mounted. That’s where I keep all my personal info. So, I’ve got a fully working Linux OS with the dataset fully encrypted. It only comes online once I’ve loaded it with the password and mounted that dataset to My Documents folder. So only what needs to be encrypted is encrypted, while the OS and system itself works normally at full speed, unlike if the whole disk was encrypted at the device level. This would have had more of a performance impact on the OS. So this is a great way for encryption to work.

The only thing I’m not too happy about is that ZFS encryption doesn’t support multiple passwords or certificates. Otherwise, I would have used my two Yubikeys to encrypt my dataset. Small issue. I hope they fix it in later releases of ZFS.

Stuff to think about

Once I’ve got a full backup, I’ve got the confidence to think about if I need to make my backup and raid configurations better or not. Now that I write these down, there are definately improvements I can make.

The stuff that’s on my mind are:

Full Backup Storage

  • Do I need another full 14TB backup drive or not? Or is that an overkill?

  • If so, would they be synchronised at the ZFS level constantly, or do I do a backup on one the first weekend and the other on the 2nd weekend?

  • I should use snapshots on the full backup, shouldn’t I? Ideal for this sort of thing.

Raid Storage

  • Do I leave it at RaidZ1 or should I go for RaidZ2?

  • Should I remove my existing partitions and give the whole disk for re-silvering?

  • What’s my strategy in case we have a disk failure?

  • When do I replace my smaller drives?

  • Would the existing expansion space be good enough for at least a year?

DAS Enclosure

  • Should I replace my ProBox with a 5 bay RICO?