5 year old hardware - Will it FreeNAS?

[FoulG]

Due to hardware failing on my Windows Home Server, I'm planning to move to FreeNAS on a machine I already have. Other than there being no ECC and 5 - 7 year old hardware, might there be any other "gotcha" in this build?

The mobo only has 6 SATA ports, which will limit how many of the drives I use. And because of their age, maybe I shouldn't use the Samsung drives. The WD Red 4TB drives are new.

Asus Z87-K Motherboard - ATX, LGA1150
Intel Core i7-4770 (BX80646I74770)
Patriot Viper 3 Black Mamba 16GB DDR3 1600 MHz PC3-12800 240 Pin (PV316G160C0K)
LG 24X DVD Burner
SanDisk Ultra Plus 128GB SSD SATA III
2 x WD Red 4TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD40EFRX
2 x WD Black 500GB SATA 6Gb/s 7200 RPM 64MB Cache (WD5003AZEX)
4 x Samsung HD204UI Spinpoint F4EG 2TB Internal hard drive Serial ATA-300 3.5" 5400 RPM
Thermaltake Chaser A31 Gaming ATX Mid-Tower Case (VP300A1W2N)
Thermaltake 650W Modular (SP-650M)

 

[Basil Hendroff]

Looks impressive, but I suggest you check you hardware list off the FreeNAS hardware recommendation guide found here.

 

[rvassar]

Are the 500Gb WD's worth the electricity / chassis space? Even zero-hours new, I'd ask that question. You can get 4Tb drives for $99/ea a couple days a week.

As for ECC... My opinion, the scrub of death is over hyped. For home use, you're likely fine... Unless you have a hobby involving photons with energies above 1 KeV in near proximity to the server, or live above 10,000 feet, etc...

 

[danb35]

As for ECC... My opinion, the scrub of death is over hyped.

I agree. The "scrub of death" is not the (or a) reason to use ECC. The reason to use ECC is that you care about your data, you've built a server using a bulletproof filesystem, and choosing not to use ECC leaves a large hole in your data integrity. It's rather like putting a screen door on a submarine. ZFS certainly isn't any worse than any other filesystem without ECC (and it's in fact still better in terms of data integrity), but it's still a big hole.

 

[Chris Moore]

Due to hardware failing on my Windows Home Server, I'm planning to move to FreeNAS on a machine I already have. Other than there being no ECC and 5 - 7 year old hardware, might there be any other "gotcha" in this build?

The mobo only has 6 SATA ports, which will limit how many of the drives I use. And because of their age, maybe I shouldn't use the Samsung drives. The WD Red 4TB drives are new.

Asus Z87-K Motherboard - ATX, LGA1150
Intel Core i7-4770 (BX80646I74770)
Patriot Viper 3 Black Mamba 16GB DDR3 1600 MHz PC3-12800 240 Pin (PV316G160C0K)
LG 24X DVD Burner
SanDisk Ultra Plus 128GB SSD SATA III
2 x WD Red 4TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD40EFRX
2 x WD Black 500GB SATA 6Gb/s 7200 RPM 64MB Cache (WD5003AZEX)
4 x Samsung HD204UI Spinpoint F4EG 2TB Internal hard drive Serial ATA-300 3.5" 5400 RPM
Thermaltake Chaser A31 Gaming ATX Mid-Tower Case (VP300A1W2N)
Thermaltake 650W Modular (SP-650M)

The problem with this list is not the age. The problem is that it is gaming hardware, not server hardware.
If you have no choice because of budget limitations, you can probably get it to work, but it could be better (more reliability) with better hardware.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[Chris Moore]

PS. No reason to spend a drive bay on the DVD drive, just install FreeNAS from USB.
Add a SAS controller if you want more drives.
Did you look at the hardware guide?

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[MrToddsFriends]

Asus Z87-K Motherboard - ATX, LGA1150

Has a Realtek 8111GR onboard NIC. Better use a Intel GBit PCIe NIC instead if you want to use this hardware as Realtek NICs have driver issues in FreeBSD/FreeNAS.

Also do a Hardware Validation/Burnin before putting the hardware into service. See for example Chapter 4 of Uncle Fester's Basic FreeNAS 9.10 Configuration Guide.

 

[rvassar]

It's rather like putting a screen door on a submarine.

I would be willing to amend my statement to include proximity to nuclear reactors on submarines with screen doors for shielding.

ZFS certainly isn't any worse than any other filesystem without ECC (and it's in fact still better in terms of data integrity), but it's still a big hole.

On ZFS, agreed. But as for the "big hole", it's the risk assessment missing from your statement. Is the data on his home server worth spending hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars on ECC motherboards & RAM? Many of us have made that risk assessment, and decided a tiered backup plan is more cost effective. Example: I park the really important stuff out on AWS Glacier. Costs me $10/mo at most. I balance that cost against the risk of a bit flip, vs all the other physical security threats my data faces here at home, from tornados to physical hardware theft. I decided the backups are more cost effective.

Keep in mind I might change my answer if he lived in Truckee, CA, or Denver, CO, but the highest point in the Dallas metro is 1,368 feet. His granite counter tops produce more radiation via radon than incident cosmic rays at that location.

Make no mistake... In any business use case, where data == $$, I use ECC.

 

[danb35]

I would be willing to amend my statement to include proximity to nuclear reactors on submarines with screen doors for shielding.

LOL!

Is the data on his home server worth spending hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars on ECC motherboards & RAM? Many of us have made that risk assessment, and decided a tiered backup plan is more cost effective.

If that's your risk assessment, I believe you've done it poorly. If ZFS writes good data to disk, it will tell you if the data later becomes bad, even without ECC RAM (at which time you can restore from backup, if necessary). But without ECC, it can't guarantee that the data written was the data you intended to be written. That is the value of ECC in any server (or, really, in any computer system at all). RAM does fail, often subtly (at least at first), almost always without warning. If you feed your server good data over the network, and the RAM corrupts it before it gets written to disk, none of your backups will help--they'll be backing up the same bogus data that's on your disk. ECC RAM and the offsite backup protect against two completely different kinds of failures.

As to the cost argument, I don't really buy it. It's one thing if you're trying to repurpose existing hardware, as OP is. But if you're buying hardware for the server, on the low end, there are some really good deals on small pre-built servers (the Proliant ML10 that we saw last year under $200 being probably the best in recent memory); on the higher end, used enterprise gear will do 95+% of what new gear will, at 90+% of the energy efficiency, at something like 25% of the cost. The system in my sig cost me about $1k (less disks), two years ago. The comparable machine today would be $3k bare bones, with no CPUs or RAM. Add a pair of E5-2650v4s and RAM, and you're pushing $7k.

 

[rvassar]

If that's your risk assessment, I believe you've done it poorly.

I disagree. I have estimated dollars lost vs cost. I have an ESXi server sitting right next to my NAS that supports ECC, I'd just have to buy the DIMM's. I could swap the chassis.

My Examples:

Plex Data - Per the law, this *is* the backup. Loss = $0 (assumption my time also $0 ymmv...)
Pics & Family Photos / home movies: Backup up to DVD-R & Glacier. Loss = $0
Spam signature DB & source tracking - This is actually my biggest changing dataset. I have a huge MySQL DB of Spam signatures and sources. But I'm no longer an email server pro, so this is a hobby. Loss = $0
Personal Source Code / Playbooks - Hosted on a VPS in the cloud with ECC! Home NAS is a working backup. Loss not $0, but acceptable risk due to source control.
VM's - easily regenerated from Ansible Playbooks. (again my time = $0 ymmv...)
Windows Backups - My kids would get to reinstall & restart all their video games... Loss $0

Again, I have maybe $10/mo worth of critical stuff in Glacier. For $20, I can keep two copies and compare them. That's less than 1 stick of ECC for the existing chassis I could swap to.

Only the OP can do this assessment, and place the values on his data.

 

[danb35]

I have estimated dollars lost vs cost.

...but in doing so, you're addressing different kinds of failures. ECC protects against one kind of failure (corruption of data in flight that results in bad data being written to disk). Backups* protect against another (hardware failure beyond the limits of your redundancy). Both are important, but one doesn't replace the other. That's why I said that, IMO, you did your risk assessment poorly.

* I've been assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that you've been running those backups from the FreeNAS box. If you're backing up directly from the respective sources, then that's a horse of a different color.

 

[Chris Moore]

Is the data on his home server worth spending hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars on ECC motherboards & RAM?

I think my data is worth ECC. Personally, I think that if you are going to invest in building a server at all, there is no point in doing it with anything but good quality server components. You might get away with a high end workstation that uses ECC memory, but only if your budget is tight. I like the Xeon E5 systems right now because the cost of memory isn't totally insane, because you can use Registered ECC instead of Unbuffered.
It is definitly hundreds, but not thousands, unless you have a hangup on buying previously used equipment. If you just gotta have the newest gear, that is going to run into real money. This is what I would buy, if it were my money and I wasn't afraid to spend a little for something that will last me 3 to 5 years:

$109.00
Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2 2.6GHz 8 Core
https://www.ebay.com/itm/SR1A8-Inte...8-Core-CM8063501375101-Processor/192524131095

$199.99
SuperMicro X9SRL-F Motherboard
https://www.ebay.com/itm/SuperMicro-X9SRL-F-Motherboard/153025744510

$140.00
32GB (4X8GB) ECC Memory, Registered
https://www.ebay.com/itm/32GB-4X8GB...RW-F-X9SRW-3F-X9SRL-F-X9SRL-B103/282323196602

These are the important bits for ECC, and without a calculator, I think it is in the ballpark of $450 plus possible shipping charges.

again my time = $0 ymmv...

My time is worth money, and my free time, at home with my wife and kids, that is worth even more to me than money because I can never buy back that time with my family.
I want my server to work reliably because I don't want to have to spend my free time fixing it. That is why I have two servers, each with redundant power supplies, and ZFS. If I have down time, I want it to be my choice, not because the thing broke for some reason I could have avoided. That includes the corruption of my data. One of the reasons I went to ZFS to begin with is to do all I can to avoid the corruption of my precious, family photos

I had a hardware RAID controller go bad on me once, this is what it does to your images:

This is an example, not one of my photos.
I want to be able to trust that the data I store is the data I will get back. There is no way to go back and take a photo of my daughter when she was 2, so if that image is damaged by my storage system...

 

[Chris Moore]

2 x WD Red 4TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD40EFRX
2 x WD Black 500GB SATA 6Gb/s 7200 RPM 64MB Cache (WD5003AZEX)
4 x Samsung HD204UI Spinpoint F4EG 2TB Internal hard drive Serial ATA-300 3.5" 5400 RPM

This is not an ideal group of disks, but we have some options here.
Before I throw an idea at you, how did you plan to arrange these disks into storage?

 

[Chris Moore]

I have maybe $10/mo worth of critical stuff in Glacier. For $20, I can keep two copies and compare them.

So, if we go with the $20 a month number, in three years it will have costed you $720 to store a backup to the backup on cloud services. You could almost buy two Xeon E5 servers with ECC memory for that... Cost of cloud storage adds up and you can't write it off as a cost of doing business.
Or, maybe you can...

 

[rvassar]

* I've been assuming, perhaps incorrectly, that you've been running those backups from the FreeNAS box. If you're backing up directly from the respective sources, then that's a horse of a different color.

I don't think there's a Glacier client for FreeNAS. I saw there's an S3 plugin, but didn't poke at it, maybe its in there. But no, that's being pushed separately. Of course, none of the rest of the chain has ECC either. A couple laptops, a desktop, etc... My son's gaming rig is the only thing backed up to the NAS, completely unprotected. If he gets burned... It's a good learning experience for a teen.

I do recognize the value of ECC. I really do. I also like to have a bit of fun with it, because this discussion has been swirling around ZFS since the beginning. But a lot has changed in the semiconductor business since the early 2000's. (puts Geology hat on) All lead on planet Earth is the decay by-product of uranium. So as we passed roughly 150nm integration era, The solder used to bond the carrier wires to the chips had to be further refined to be completely uranium free, or they would be sources of alpha particles that could flip bits. RoHS regulations have pushed chip makers away from lead entirely, so one of the close causes for the need for ECC is now history. (/geology hat) Having used ZFS since 2006 across hundreds of ECC systems, I've only seen a handful of ECC corrections logged. Having used ZFS personally across roughly half that time frame on non-ECC x86 kit, I have to my knowledge not experienced a bit flip, I don't know anyone that has been bitten by the scrub of death.

So I buy my ticket and I take my chances. I mostly have the ESX box and the NAS for rapid prototyping and technology investigation. Being in software engineering, I have to completely turn over my expertise every 3 to 5 years. I'm forever looking at software, libraries, combinations & interactions, etc... Most of it never lasts the weekend, let alone a month.

 

[rvassar]

So, if we go with the $20 a month number, in three years it will have costed you $720 to store a backup to the backup on cloud services. You could almost buy two Xeon E5 servers with ECC memory for that... Cost of cloud storage adds up and you can't write it off as a cost of doing business.
Or, maybe you can...

Can't write it off. But that's $720 before you even get started. I can save that $720 by borrowing my wife's car 1 day a week over 3 years... Probably less.

 

[Chris Moore]

Can't write it off. But that's $720 before you even get started. I can save that $720 by borrowing my wife's car 1 day a week over 3 years... Probably less.

I don't get that. How do you save money by borrowing your wife's car?

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[rvassar]

This is not an ideal group of disks, but we have some options here.
Before I throw an idea at you, how did you plan to arrange these disks into storage?

I was going to suggest pulling the SMART reports off the 2Tb drives. If they were on the failing Windows Server, maybe they were configured for power saving, and spent a lot of time spun down. If that's the case the 2Tb drives might have some life left in them. Cycle count might be kind of high though...

 

[rvassar]

I don't get that. How do you save money by borrowing your wife's car?

She has an actual "car". My current daily driver is a old Ford Excursion, with the 7.3l diesel.

 

[danb35]

I do recognize the value of ECC. I really do.

...and by the same token, I'm not one of those who says "you must use ECC with ZFS, no questions or exceptions." There is definite value there, and I think in most cases it's worth the (usually) nominal cost delta, but it's not absolutely required, the system is not more dangerous without it than any other system without it, etc.