48TB with only 16gb Ram, will it raid0?

[nzero]

Hello, originally I had built a FreeNAS box to have 8 separate windows SMB shared drives. but I am also wondering if what I built will support raid0? I will have 1 client (security camera server, which will be constantly writing, and i will have 2 clients that will from time-to-time read data / pull video footage.

here are specs:

mobo: ASRock C2750D4I+ (built in CPU)
ram: Crucial 16GB ECC Unbuffered (CT2KIT102472BD160B)
drives: 8x 6tb HGST

There is nothing else running on the NAS server. will raid-0 run stable on my build? even with 16gb? or should i just stick to 8x SMB drives.

Thanks

 

[Ericloewe]

Generally speaking, 16GB of RAM are enough for many workloads.

The real problem here is that any interpretation of what little you've told us about your setup suggests that it is a horrible setup. Are you seriously running eight SMB shares, each on a separate hard drive?

 

[Chris Moore]

There is nothing else running on the nas server. will raid-0 run stable on my build? even with 16gb? or should i just stick to 8x SMB drives.

I think that you are using the wrong terminology (I hope) and maybe that is causing us some confusion because what you are saying doesn't make sense.
Try taking a look at this:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.37/
and probably looking at this:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/

 

[danb35]

will raid-0 run stable on my build?

Probably. Why would you want to? Is the data of such little value that you're fine with a single drive failure destroying all of it?

 

[nzero]

ok let me give some details.

- redundancy on NAS is not required, most amount of space is whats required.
- there are 48 ip cameras, connecting to a switch, which then connect to a windows server that manages the cameras & footage via software.
- each IP camera has a built in 64gb SD card for local storage (short term redundancy is here, incase nas footage is lost)
- the NAS has 8 drives. I want to split the 48cameras to record between the drives in groups of 6. so if 1 drive fails, only the footage of 6 cameras is lost.

what would be the best volume setting for this purpose based on the system specs i have?

 

[Chris Moore]

That is a lot of cameras. What is the volume of data in terms of MB/s if you have that? For that number of cameras, you may need more drives under any circumstances because each drive can only write a given amount of data per second (MB/s) so you may need more drives no matter what. Also, you may need to go with some other solution besides FreeNAS because the way you want to use this is not the way FreeNAS is designed to work. FreeNAS is all about data reliability and that is not where you are at.

 

[nzero]

each camera is going to recording at 0.37mb/s. i chose to try freenas for this project because it seemed like simple interface, simple deployment and large support community. do i need to use its redundancy features by force or else the system wont work at all?

 

[LIGISTX]

In the scheme of the cost of all of this, is a few more drives really a big deal? FreeNAS may not be your solution, but if you can pony up for 48 cameras, is another ~500 dollars in hard drives to give your self some redundancy really where this plan falls apart? Lol.

You could likely build a FreeNAS box to suit your needs, but not with that setup.

I’m a huge noob in this world of FreeNAS, but that’s my industrial engineering .02.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Chris Moore]

each camera is going to recording at 0.37mb/s

At a bitrate that low, is the imagery even usable?

i chose to try freenas for this project because it seemed like simple interface, simple deployment

FreeNAS is the community supported version of an Enterprise storage solution called TrueNAS that is sold on NAS appliances made by iXsystems. Just because it is 'free' does not mean that it can be used with any hardware and in any way you please and the reason is simply because it wasn't made to be used that way.

do i need to use its redundancy features by force or else the system wont work at all?

You should not try to make each drive an independant volume and a separate share, especially with that very low end system board you referenced in the first post. FreeNAS uses ZFS as the file system if you don't know what that means, you need to look deeply into the matter of ZFS. ZFS has a lot of memory and processor overhead compared to other file systems because it makes a checksum for every chunk of data that it writes to disk. The reason for this is that the inventors of ZFS, some engineers at Sun Microsystems, felt that they wanted to be able to ensure the data read back from disk was the same as the data written to disk. Something about data integrity, nothing you appear to be interested in.

Anyhow, for the sake of your data, you should at least make the pool a RAID-z1 so that a single drive failure does not loose the entire storage pool. Did you look at the terminology reference I pointed you at?
If you choose not to do that, you can make all the drives into a stripe with no redundancy. I have never done that, but it can be done through the GUI and then share the entire storage pool to the network as a destination for writing your videos.
It should work, if the data rate you gave me is accurate.

 

[Chris Moore]

so if 1 drive fails, only the footage of 6 cameras is lost.

This right here. FreeNAS is all about not losing ANY data. In this forum, the very idea of sacrificing data to a disk failure is just so foreign that it is like you are speaking another language.

No. Get a bigger system with more drives and run RAID-z2 so you don't have any data loss unless more than two drives fail.

 

[danb35]

FreeNAS is all about not losing ANY data. In this forum, the very idea of sacrificing data to a disk failure is just so foreign that it is like you are speaking another language.

That's far too strong. Yes, by and large, we value our data, and we assume that other users value theirs as well. But there are valid use cases for FreeNAS where the data simply isn't that valuable, and some loss can be tolerated. If he understands what he's doing, and what the risks are, well and good.

 

[nzero]

At a bitrate that low, is the imagery even usable?

the bitrate average is about 3000kbps, 1080p at 6fps. image quality is excellent for its purpose.

i appreciate the explanation on how the write checks are done and why freenas is resourceful. i looked at terminology thanks, however in my case redundancy of data is not required for this project, the camera can already store 4-5days of footage locally on a SD card, thats the only redundancy needed for the time being. iam stuck with what i have and freenas for time being unless there is another USB bootable NAS solution can be recommended that works better for this application.

i based the build off: http://crit.tv/our-new-nas-40-tb-64-gb-ecc-ram-ssd-caching-10-bay-case/ - just figured i didnt need as much ram since i wasnt running virtualization or any other features apart from just writing to drives.

so creating 8 individual shared drives is a no go because of hardware specs i have, thanks thats one thing that can be checked off. is there a reference for how much hardware usage per shared drive there is?


is striping all drives and sharing it as 1 going to require the least hardware usage?

 

[nzero]

That's far too strong. Yes, by and large, we value our data, and we assume that other users value theirs as well. But there are valid use cases for FreeNAS where the data simply isn't that valuable, and some loss can be tolerated. If he understands what he's doing, and what the risks are, well and good.

THANK YOU, yes i understand the risks, not sure how else to make it more clear I don't need redundancy and the data is not valuable, just wanted to have 8 individually shared drives as network attached storage, but that doesn't even seem possible on FreeNAS given my hardware specs, so I will even settle for just 1 shared SMB with all 8 drives stripped...

 

[SweetAndLow]

Should work just fine. Each disk will be its own pool and then create a dataset on each pool that you can share with SMB. 16GB of RAM will work just fine.