Raid on the Boot Drive

[David Haigh]

Hi Folks
Totally new to FreeNAS so please feel free to ....
Had a read through the what you need 2016 build document, and things have certainly moved on since there. So on my first build foray I have a few questions.
The first being the title, will be using a Gigabyte Intel C246-WU4 board, and it has two M.2 slots. One of which I will be using as a boot drive, so is it worth getting two and have them in a raid mirror via the MOBO before I install the OS?
Secondly back in 2016 AMD didn't do servers but with the rise of EPYC is FreeNAS compatible on these or even Ryzen MOBO?
I know Ryzen isn't SERVER, but I was just curious.
Thanks in advance, and be gentle with me!
David

 

[garm]

raid mirror via the MOBO before I install the OS?

No!

 

[David Haigh]

No!

Well that says it all! Any explanation? :)

 

[danb35]

Any explanation?

Seems silly and pointless to introduce motherboard-level FakeRAID into your boot pool when FreeNAS will mirror it for you.

 

[Bikerchris]

Hi Folks
Totally new to FreeNAS so please feel free to ....
Had a read through the what you need 2016 build document, and things have certainly moved on since there. So on my first build foray I have a few questions.
The first being the title, will be using a Gigabyte Intel C246-WU4 board, and it has two M.2 slots. One of which I will be using as a boot drive, so is it worth getting two and have them in a raid mirror via the MOBO before I install the OS?
Secondly back in 2016 AMD didn't do servers but with the rise of EPYC is FreeNAS compatible on these or even Ryzen MOBO?
I know Ryzen isn't SERVER, but I was just curious.
Thanks in advance, and be gentle with me!
David

Hello David,

I am incredibly new here and may cause more problems than I solve by responding.

But from my cursory understanding of FreeNAS:

No to using the onboard RAID for mirroring the boot drives, you should use FreeNAS, it's very easy and preferred during the install phase.
I have seen very few mentions of EPYC being used with FreeNAS, I would play it safe with and go Intel...for the time being.
You may not wish to be too enthusiastic about using M.2. for boot drives, may be look at good SSD's instead? More for reliable stability and cost concerns (I have no evidence).
2 x Intel NICS are good.

The million dollar question you should include is what the purpose is.

Hope that helps!

Chris

 

[Yorick]

M.2 as a boot device works fine.
ZFS can mirror the boot device, I am unclear how that behaves with selecting a boot drive in BIOS. Daily config backup (synced to cloud?) seems more important than boot mirror.

EPYC: yes search these forums, someone built with EPYC and loved it because of all the pcie lanes.

 

[Bikerchris]

M.2 as a boot device works fine.
ZFS can mirror the boot device, I am unclear how that behaves with selecting a boot drive in BIOS. Daily config backup (synced to cloud?) seems more important than boot mirror.

EPYC: yes search these forums, someone built with EPYC and loved it because of all the pcie lanes.

I'd go with Yorick's comments ;)

 

[danb35]

Daily config backup (synced to cloud?) seems more important than boot mirror.

Boot mirror will keep the system from dying when a boot device dies. And as you know, the config is already backed up daily to the .system dataset--now if only the Devs would come up with a nice easy way in the GUI to import that backup.

 

[Yorick]

Boot mirror will keep the system from dying when a boot device dies

What's your experience with that? If it's bad sectors and such, ZFS will take care of that. If the drives dies to where it won't boot, is there a way to have the BIOS "fall through" to the next drive by having both in the boot order? Does the FreeNAS installer create the necessary boot files on both drives?

 

[Yorick]

And as you know, the config is already backed up daily to the .system dataset

I actually had no idea. Turns out the feature to import that was suggested in 2018, promised to be implemented after feature parity, and then disappeared in backlog. I re-created it as a suggestion - give it those 10 votes so ixSystems can decide whether and when to implement that. https://jira.ixsystems.com/browse/NAS-105948

 

[danb35]

Turns out the feature to import that was suggested in 2018

Actually, that ticket was in 2017, and I'm pretty sure that wasn't the first request--I seem to recall creating a ticket in Redmine. I'm not certain, but I believe the automatic backups go back to the release of 9.3 (yep, here's a post of mine about it back then).

give it those 10 votes

I can't give it 10, but I gave it one.

 

[Arwen]

I gave it my vote too.

There was a cronjob someone made that allowed backing up the configuration to any local directory I have it backing up to my main pool. In someways I wish it would de-duplicate, meaning if nothing changed from prior backup, simply update the backup time stamp, (aka "touch" the file). But, they are small enough files that it does not mater.

 

[Yorick]

There was a cronjob someone made that allowed backing up the configuration to any local directory

That's what I am using, plus a cloud sync job. I changed the script a little so it only keeps N days, that's at https://github.com/thorsteneb/FreeNAS-scripts .

 

[K_switch]

so is it worth getting two and have them in a raid mirror via the MOBO before I install the OS

This is my opinion:

I would not take up the lanes for a mirrored m.2 boot disks... FreeNAS has ZERO problems booting off of USB devices. However i am aware that USBs do not have the best lifetime writes, with that i will mirror two 32gb low profile usbs. Once you have gone through and built your pools and shares/configs i follow this link to backup configs in the event of losing both boot disks.

EPYC: yes search these forums, someone built with EPYC and loved it because of all the pcie lanes.

I have built almost nothing by EPYC FreeNAS machines for about 6 months now and have had NO ISSUES.

or even Ryzen MOBO?

I have seen alot of personal builds with Ryzen but wouldn't recommend for a corp environment.

 

[danb35]

I actually had no idea.

I thought we'd discussed it previously, but I wouldn't swear to it. For a feature that's been in place for over 5 years, it doesn't seem very well-known.