Three, 2.5" drives... Two on USB

[wungun]

Two on USB, and one on the SATA drive channel... I notice on large transfer, the USB drives are steady, while the SATA drive is working in short bursts.
Not an issue really, but transfer speeds steadily drop until the SATA drive kicks in then rated increase. Then they go down again, and repeat.
Obviously bandwidth difference, but still...
Kinda odd..
And a little frustrating

 

[HoneyBadger]

Back up anything of value, export the pool, attach those drives internally on the SATA bus where they belong, and import the pool again.

Now that it's not a ticking time bomb, we can start troubleshooting performance. But I imagine that at this point, it will have cleared itself up.

 

[wungun]

Would be nice... Except my hardware is a ACER Aspire mini tower... Just a single SATA port unfortunetly

 

[HoneyBadger]

Would be nice... Except my hardware is a ACER Aspire mini tower... Just a single SATA port unfortunetly

You're definitely running far below the minimum recommendations for FreeNAS. At this point all I can suggest is that you don't store anything of value there.

 

[wungun]

Its a desktop processor though! Athlon 64 X2 ;)
4gb ram (laptop memory though)
Just a single user nas at home...

What is the concern... That Ill lose my data because of the hardware config?

 

[wungun]

... Or because its a 3 drive stripe, there is no redundancy...?

This is my first NAS so budget was a concern.
Also, I needed something small, quiet, inconspicuous and not a electro sucker :)

 

[HoneyBadger]

Really it's "all of the above":

- You're on a 3-drive stripe, so you have zero ability to fix corrupted data on the fly
- Two of those three drives are on USB, so if they detach, lose power, spin down for too long or otherwise go missing, your pool is toast
- That system has non-ECC RAM and not enough of it
- Consumer-level gear has absolutely terrible FreeBSD support

I'm not trying to be mean, but that system really isn't designed in any way to run ZFS. The fact that it works at all is stunning enough.

I can respect wanting something small, quiet, and cheap on the power bill, but it's really not a good match for FreeNAS.

A good place to start for a "cheap server" would be something like a Lenovo Thinkserver TS140, with 8GB of RAM.

 

[wungun]

I do have them set to spin down.... And they do except 1 of the USB drives. Actually with plex server running and GDM enabled, they constantly spin.
I have a collector of older SATA and ide drives, 250, 350, a pair of 500GB....all my data is hacked up manually on a couple of these...
I appreciate your feedback and opinion... No offence taken :)
Would legacy file system be any better, apart from the risk of data loss that is?

I was thinking of an external raid drive cage and utilize my desktop drives... But they run thru USB and on a single 2.0 port, would probably suck at transfer speeds.

 

[wungun]

As an aside, those USB drives can be pulled out of their cases because they are literally just 2.5" SATA drives.... And connected that way, to some external drive controller. But an external controller would negate any way of freenas protecting data I believe...?

 

[DrKK]

Sir. Put the FreeNAS down. Put it down now.

Perhaps you'd be happier with something from Synology or QNAP...or perhaps something Linuxy.

 

[wungun]

Happier? It runs perfectly fine for what I need of it.

 

[mjws00]

Heh. Generally this forum is far more blunt.

Your hardware is not adequate. The system will crash eventually and when you reboot the pool will be unmountable. Everything gone, not a file error or sluggish performance. Just total loss. Did I mention TOTAL LOSS OF DATA?

There are dozens of better NAS choices that won't randomly eat your data when under specced. Try xpenology, opemediavault, nas4free, any flavor of Linux.

We are definitely the best place to hang out. So I won't fault ya for trying to stick around. ;) But because the system targets big servers it fails unpredictably and catastrophically on poor hardware.

It's your data and your time wasted. You might get lucky and run for a while, but this always ends with the same tears.

 

[wungun]

Meh... Maybe I'll try to find a used, last Gen Xenon server that I can migrant over to....
Thanks for all the warning!

 

[HoneyBadger]

I suggested the Lenovo TS140 in another post so I'll link it again for US$250. Add 4GB more RAM and your hard drives and you're set.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F6EK9J2/?tag=ozlp-20

 

[wungun]

Saw that... But I'm in Canada. They won't ship it here.
How bout a Dell T3500...?
8gb ECC ddr3, one 10k rpm HDD Xenon quad core, $200

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Saw that... But I'm in Canada. They won't ship it here.
How bout a Dell T3500...?
8gb ECC ddr3, one 10k rpm HDD Xenon quad core, $200

If you like Dell, a PowerEdge T20 would probably be a better choice.

 

[Fraoch]

Saw that... But I'm in Canada. They won't ship it here.

I see NCIX just brought in a bunch of different TS140 configurations. A lot more than US $250 though.

Still, this would have been cheaper than what I have in my signature. I would definitely have considered it at the time.

 

[wungun]

No, I'm not a fan of Dell.... I've always built my own machines.
Here I'd what I'm looking at....

http://www.canadamonitors.com/

http://canadaserver.wix.com/canadaserver#!tower-servers/c1yuh

 

[LongHair4277]

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Lenovo-Think...921?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item25a2cfcf21
Similar Lenovo as mentioned above, they ship to Canada, even have the import charges looked after.

 

[wungun]

Not sure About these... Desktop cpu I'm not thrilled about. Xeon has more cache and 4 cores... That system is $450 + shipping and half the RAM of the $200 local machine I linked to...
And ddr3, which is newer and faster than any of the hardware I have in my house!

http://canadaserver.wix.com/canadaserver#!product/prd1/3930845091/dell-t3500-,-quad-core-,-8gb