FreeNas noob

[n00bftw007]

Hi, I am currently building a NAS box, waiting on parts. With that said, I wanted to find out the best way to go about setting up the disks, options for maximum speed, and decent speed with some resilience? I also read that mirroring will be just as advantageous regarding performance. Also, confused about how many Vdevs I should have, and how that might also affect performance and resilience.

I have 8x14tb drives, each top out at around 210-220Mb/s. The NAS will be used for backups from two other machines on a 10GB network. Maybe some light virtualisation and messing around. The NAS is set to have 64GB of RAM, not sure if I should use 128GB instead? Have also read that L2ARC and SLOG (ZIL) increase write performance, not sure if that will be beneficial to my situation.

Additionally, If I was to use ESXI as the base system, and FreeNas in a VM, would disk performance suffer somewhat?

 

[n00bftw007]

Forgot to add the below

Is it best to put FreeNas on a USB drive, or on an M.2 drive? Having it on a USB drive would allow me to keep the M.2 slot free for something else. If I did use a USB drive, should I use two in a mirror?

Thanks in advance

 

[Heracles]

Hi,

confused about how many Vdevs I should have

The more vDev you have, the more speed you will have. Also, by going with mirrors, it will be easier to add space in your pool by adding a single 2 drives vDev versus adding 8 more drives for a second Raid-Z2 vDev.

The NAS is set to have 64GB of RAM, not sure if I should use 128GB instead?

FreeNAS will never have too much RAM. 64 G should be enough for what you described.

Have also read that L2ARC and SLOG (ZIL) increase write performance

L2ARC will have no effect on write performance at all, because it is a cache that is meant to speed up read access.

An SLOG may help for write requests by doing them faster than the pool would do itself. Once written in the SLOG, the content can be commited to the pool at a later moment. It helps with sync writes,

If I was to use ESXI as the base system, and FreeNas in a VM, would disk performance suffer somewhat?

To do that, you must be sure not to present FreeNAS with any virtual drive. You must use PCI PassThrough and present your controller to FreeNAS directly.

Is it best to put FreeNas on a USB drive, or on an M.2 drive?

Here, I chose to mirror my USB boot drive as a trade-off between the two options. USB are not as reliable and durable as other support, but they do not use any valuable port and do not need any speed. You can go USB, but then you should mirror your boot device.

Have fun with your new system,

 

[n00bftw007]

Hi,



The more vDev you have, the more speed you will have. Also, by going with mirrors, it will be easier to add space in your pool by adding a single 2 drives vDev versus adding 8 more drives for a second Raid-Z2 vDev.



FreeNAS will never have too much RAM. 64 G should be enough for what you described.



L2ARC will have no effect on write performance at all, because it is a cache that is meant to speed up read access.

An SLOG may help for write requests by doing them faster than the pool would do itself. Once written in the SLOG, the content can be commited to the pool at a later moment. It helps with sync writes,



To do that, you must be sure not to present FreeNAS with any virtual drive. You must use PCI PassThrough and present your controller to FreeNAS directly.



Here, I chose to mirror my USB boot drive as a trade-off between the two options. USB are not as reliable and durable as other support, but they do not use any valuable port and do not need any speed. You can go USB, but then you should mirror your boot device.

Have fun with your new system,

Thanks for the reply. In regard to backing up specifically, would L2ARC or SLOG really be worth it, or even used? I read elsewhere that SLOG is only beneficial for VM's and databases, and L2ARC only beneficial when the same files are being read over and over, which I don't really see happening in my use case, or maybe I'm just not considering things correctly.

 

[Heracles]

For archiving only, there is no point in using an L2ARC or an SLOG. But you mentioned you would do some VMs, so for that they may be of use.

Usually, you achieve better performance for your money with 128G of RAM before going to an L2ARC, but there is no big harm having one with 64G.

 

[n00bftw007]

Lby adding 128GB of RAM, you mean literally just that, no other setting anything up on the software side. Literally just having 128GB. Thanks.

 

[n00bftw007]

By*

 

[ddaenen1]

Forgot to add the below

Is it best to put FreeNas on a USB drive, or on an M.2 drive? Having it on a USB drive would allow me to keep the M.2 slot free for something else. If I did use a USB drive, should I use two in a mirror?

Thanks in advance

I recommend staying away from USB drives for FreeNAS. I have mine installed on 2 mirrored 120GB SSD's for reliability. I already had a USB drive crash with FreeNAS. Fortunately i had made a config backup only the day before so a new install and uploading the config saved all but it thought me a lesson.

 

[n00bftw007]

Seems like an absolute waist of an M.2 slot to me. Whats the chance of two in a mirror breaking at the same time, pretty low.

 

[pschatz100]

There are a few folks who have used USB SSD's for their boot drive. If you want to use USB boot devices, that would be much better than using thumb drives.

The issue with thumb drives is not whether or not they will die, because they will. The question is how long they will run before they die. Thumb drives are not designed for the amount of writes that newer versions of FreeNAS execute.

Keep frequent backups of your configuration, and you will be able to restore your system in the event of a boot device problem. FreeNAS makes this easy to do through the GUI.