2TB hard drive "funnies"

[leenux_tux]

Hello forum,

Firstly, apologies for the long post !!

Got a couple of strange things happening with my FreeNAS 8 install that I was hoping someone could shed some light on.....

1, Can't add a 2TB hard drive via the GUI.
My setup is fairly straight forward (I think), three 1TB drives, configured RAIDZ and one 2TB drive, which I intend to use for snapshots. The three 1TB drives work fine and I have a number of ZFS datasets configured, however, I can not get the 2TB drive to be seen by the FreeNAS GUI.

When I run "camcontrol devlist", this is what I get the following

<SAMSUNG HD103SI 1AG01118> at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (ada0,pass0)
<WDC WD20EADS-00R6B0 01.00A01> at scbus1 target 0 lun 0 (ada1,pass1)
<SAMSUNG HD103SI 1AG01118> at scbus3 target 0 lun 0 (ada2,pass2)
<SAMSUNG HD103SI 1AG01118> at scbus4 target 0 lun 0 (ada3,pass3)
<USB 2.0 Flash Disk 5.00> at scbus9 target 0 lun 0 (da0,pass4)

ada0, 2 and 3 are being used in the RAIDZ, da0 is where FreeNAS is installed, and ada1 is the 2TB drive. So, at the operating system level the drive is being seen.

2, Attempting to create a new volume using the GUI lists a drive already used in my RAIDZ ??
When I look at using the FreeNAS GUI to add the 2TB disk as a new volume for some reason the GUI is listing "ada3" as being available (931GB, please see attached screen dump). How ? Why ?


Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

 

[ProtoSD]

Hi leenux_tux,

You didn't mention which specific version of FreeNAS you were using 8.0, 8.01, amd64, i386, or your hardware. I've seen other users with this problem and it seems like it's a bug in the GUI. I don't know of any work around unless it's been fixed in a nightly build. How were you planning to configure your 2TB disk?

 

[leenux_tux]

Hello protosd,

Thank you for the prompt reply.

FreeNAS GUI states I am using "FreeNAS Build: FreeNAS-8.0-RELEASE-i386 ". I have a feeling you are going to advise me to upgrade !!

Rest of the setup is as follows...

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-D525TUD Dual Core D525 Atom Mini-ITX
Case - Chenbro ES34069 Mini-ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis 120W
RAM - 2 X 2GB DDR3 1333 ULP DIMM for DDR3 Mini-ITX Boards
Hard Drives - 3 X SAMSUNG HD103SI 1TB
1 X Western Digital WD20EADS 2TB

 

[leenux_tux]

Forgot to mention about the 2TB drive..... Want to use it (or perhaps part of it) for snapshots, lots of them !!

I have a VMware ESXi server as well as this machine and will eventually be backing up the VM's to the RAIDz on the FreeNAS system. I want to be able to create snapshots for all of the stuff I have on this box, music, movies, backups for all of the laptops in the house, plus the VM's from my ESXi server.

 

[ProtoSD]

FreeNAS GUI states I am using "FreeNAS Build: FreeNAS-8.0-RELEASE-i386 I have a feeling you are going to advise me to upgrade !!

Yup! Actually besides upgrading, you can run the x64 (amd64) build on your Atom which will make a difference, but as for your disk problem I don't have an answer. I know I've seen several posts with the same issue, so that leads me to believe its a GUI problem.

 

[leenux_tux]

"Doh!" Can't believe I did that.............installing a 32 bit OS on to a 64 bit enabled CPU. Did not realize, thanks for the tip ! The change in FreeNAS version will help with a few other messages I keep getting on the console as well.

 

[Milhouse]

FreeNAS GUI states I am using "FreeNAS Build: FreeNAS-8.0-RELEASE-i386 ". I have a feeling you are going to advise me to upgrade !!

If he doesn't, I will. :P

8.0.1-Release has a lot of fixes for bugs present in 8.0-Release.

You should also choose the AMD64 build when moving to 8.0.1 as your Intel Atom supports 64-bit.

Due to an increase in the build size of 8.0.1 you will need to re-create your boot media from scratch (you can't do an upgrade via the GUI) so backup your config if you want to restore this. If booting from USB then the ideal solution would be to install 8.0.1-Release on a new memory stick (minimum 2GB size) so that you can always go back to your original 8.0-Release if you have to.

 

[leenux_tux]

Millhouse, protosd, thanks for the tips. Looks like I'm going to be a tad busy over the next day or so ;-)

 

[Durkatlon]

So after you do all that, can you tell us how you intend to use the 2TB drive for snapshots? The built-in snapshot functionality of ZFS doesn't need a separate disk in order to make snapshots: it's an intrinsic part of the filesystem. Do you mean you're going to rsync the main volume - or parts of it - to a separate disk, so you can have older versions of the data around? If so you should really look into the ZFS snapshot functionality which could provide that kind of function for you without requiring additional disks. If you want this for backup purposes in case the main volume fails, that is of course a different story.

 

[leenux_tux]

There lies the reason why I posted my original message into the "N00b's" forum ;-)

I guess I need to learn a little more about the internal workings of ZFS. I thought you required another drive for snapshots. I'm more a EXT3/4 kind of guy !!

Just as an FYI....

Re-installed FreeNAS yesterday on to a new thumbdrive so now running FreeNAS 8.0.1 amd 64. All went well except for a problem with one of the hard drives, which I will post as a separate message for.