Another Dreaded NOOB

[b1gb1ll]

Hi All

Just joined up tonight after doing a fair bit of head scratching for the last week or so.

I think FreeNAS could be the answer to all my dreams, but I'm finding the learning curve is pretty steep.

I'm pretty much a 'straight down the line' Windows Guy with a few distant memories of DOS and a little bit of Linux (for my Raspberry Pi).

Now, whilst I fully appreciate that you have plenty of Guides and a Manual available and therefore the stock response is to direct us Noobs to these for reference, I have found that most of the material I have found seems to be written assuming the reader has some degree of understanding and experience in Unix/BSD, Server configuration/maintenance and RAID knowledge, I have none of the above, so would appreciate a little bit of assisteance to get me off on the right foot.

My basic needs are to provide a storage facility solely for my media (Movies; TV Shows; Music & Photos) which can then be streamed to various devices within the home (PC; Laptop; Raspberry Pi; iPads & iPhones) using XBMC or Plex and also away from the home using Plex.

I don't really know what kind of data traffic you would consider this to be, I have read about such things as 'random reads' 'large chunks of data' 'steady writes' etc, etc, etc.

I would have probably 500 GB of existing media to load up in one shot once I get stable, followed by new data as and when acquired, at say, movies 1 GB each, music albums 75 MB each, TV Show 200 MB each, photos 500 MB per batch.

I think therefore I am looking to maximize capacity rather than performance and I also need to have an element of redundancy built into this system.

Please therefore advise under the criteria laid out, what would be my best configuration the two pressing questions I have are:

1. UFS or ZFS
2. Which RAID configuration

I am just going round in circles trying to answer these two questions myself.


My current build is experimental (just to trial things) and is as follows:-

Packard Bell - Quasar 2 (Microstar) Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP3200+ Processor
2 GB 400 MHz DDR PC 3200 RAM
2 x Seagate 160 GB HHD's (1, possibly 2 more waiting to add)​

As can clearly be seen, even 4 x 160 GB HDD's aint going to fulfill my requirements for very long at all, my MOBO is maxed out at 2 GB RAM and my case/MOBO will only take 4 HDD's.
So my quandary is, I don't want to start spending money on all new hardware till I am really confident that this is the solution that works for me and therefore I have a good system model to replicate with a better level of spec.

I would be really grateful for any input.

Thanks in advance.

 

[jgreco]

You can't safely run ZFS with FreeNAS on 2GB of RAM without knowing a lot more than you do. This puts you at a disadvantage.

Also, Plex doesn't run on FreeBSD, but you can have it run on a PC that uses FreeNAS for storage. That having been said, you can certainly experiment with FreeNAS. Use UFS and RAID1 (mirroring).

The downside to that approach is that you may eventually want to go to ZFS, at which point you have to play a game of getting a much faster system to offset the fact that ZFS is a bit slow and piggy. But we live in a great era, where computing resources are fairly cheap, so if and when you get to the point you want to throw money at it, it won't be a total killer.

ZFS is desirable because of the much better options for redundancy - UFS is pretty limited to "mirror" or "not".

Fortunately, if performance is not a real pressing issue but cost is, you have an excellent option available in the HP MicroServer N36L/N40L/N54L, a platform frequently on sale for ~$300, which needs to have memory added to it, but you wind up with a reasonable 4-bay NAS with minimal work. The MicroServer isn't super-fast... I've got an N36L with 16GB of RAM running NFS that can handle around 400 megabits pretty reliably onto a 4-disk RAIDZ2.

 

[b1gb1ll]

Thanks jgreco

Also, Plex doesn't run on FreeBSD, but you can have it run on a PC that uses FreeNAS for storage.

Yes, I was wondering about Plex, it kinda defeats the object somewhat, in that I was trying to avoid having my other (Plex Server) PC running constantly but hey-ho...

Use UFS and RAID1 (mirroring).

As I go at the moment, I have realised that I need to document what I am doing, to aid the learning curve.

I think I am currently set up the way you describe, but how can I interrogate FreeNAS to confirm that I am set up as UFS and RAID1 (mirroring)?

 

[jgreco]

Probably something like Storage->Volumes->View Volumes->Volume Status but I don't have a UFS system handy to actually check.

 

[RiBeneke]

We run FreeNAS 9.1.1 on an HP N54L Micro-server. It has only 2GB memory, so the 3 x 2 TB disks are set in Raid 5 config (as I recall, the GUI does not seem to have a report on this). According to HP docs the max memory we could install is 8GB. We tried to install the Plex plugin and the UPnP plugin, but both refuse, giving a message that we need to set up ZFS. Does that mean there is no hope for us to access media on this server from a smart TV ?

 

[dlavigne]

From the Guide:

NOTE: a ZFS volume is required to use Plugins. If you have created a UFS volume, you will need to instead use Jails to install additional software.

 

[jgreco]

2GB is insufficient to run ZFS with FreeNAS as shipped. The N54L will do up to 16GB RAM.