A few questions about building a FreeNAS box to replace a WHS v1 box - testing phase

[Reciprocity75]

First post and am looking for any pitfalls for a system that I would like to assemble from mostly available components to test freenas out. I currently have a WHS v1 server that while it works, it is running out of space and is not worth upgrading. WHS2011 was where I started looking but after reading a lot of info from users out there, I started to look elsewhere. As I am running a pfsense router (which is great btw), I figured I could handle freenas.

I would like to build a test bed using the following:

Intel P45 board (DP45SG)
Intel Q9400 core2quad 2.66Ghz
8GB DDR3-1333 memory
nVidia 9400GT video card
Patriot 32GB SSD for boot (have laying around)
3 x 3.5” 500GB 7200RPM Hitachi SATA drives (have laying around)
Case and ps – need to acquire, but they will be cheap (;))

The 3 500GB drives would be in a raidz1 in a CIFS configuration. I use all windows machines at home, so CIFS seems a natural fit. I know that it is slower than NFS, but that doesn’t really concern me too much. Besides, that is why I am building this test system… to test how well/poorly it functions. It has to be faster than the whs v1 box though as that thing is SLOW.

I mostly store backups of the PC’s (3 of them), 2 are laptops but the third is a photo editing workstation with 3TB of space (but only about 1TB used at the moment, so lots of room to grow).

I also would like to host ripped movies and music for distribution to the PC’s, tablets, phones and xbox. This system will just be a test bed, so none of the data on the freenas machine will be critical as it will be on my main server as well.

So my questions are as follows:

1. Any concerns with the hardware? I don’t see any and the mobo uses a standard intel nic, so I should be good there. I know that samba only uses 1 core per share but again, out and out speed are not that important.
3. To setup the shared volumes, I would like to create 3 different shares: 1 for anyone on the network, 1 for me (login req’d) and 1 for my wife (login req’d). I am still struggling with this part (proper way to create these shares – the ZFS file system seems a little bit different than I am accustomed to with windows). Basically, in what order do I need to do things? First create the raidz partition, then create each shared volume?
5. Other suggestions on how to setup the drives for shares? When I build my ‘real’ freenas box, I will be using more and larger drives in a raidz2 and will most likely re-purpose the old server to run backup to the main box (so speed will not be a concern).
7. Other thoughts and comments are welcomed.

Thanks in advance and I look forward to the new OS and exploring its features.

-Tim

 

[toddos]

For your questions:

1. What's the max RAM limit on the mobo? If it has room to go to 16GB or even 32GB, that's good. Otherwise, the mobo and cpu seem fine.
2. You can setup shares however you like. It's generally recommended to create a dataset per share (think of a ZFS dataset like a partition), but there's no reason you can't share simple directories. Reading the docs is a good idea for this.

I decommissioned my WHS v1 box back in August and jumped right into FreeNAS. Granted I have *nix experience, but it was a pretty seamless transition as far as shares and data storage was concerned. For backups, I have a separate machine running WHS 2011 in a VM and use that exclusively for backups (repurposed some of my old WHS v1 drives into that machine, after copying data off of them to the FreeNAS machine). I went with a 4x3TB RAID-Z1 and a separate 500MB drive that I setup as a non-redundant single drive ZFS (I use this for my plugin jail). If I had to do it over again, I'd skip the 500MB drive and go with a 6x3TB RAID-Z2. For now, though, everything's working out well.

 

[Reciprocity75]

Toddos, thanks for the quick reply.

1. The MB has a limit of 8GB, but again, as this is just a test box, I am not too worried about that. For the actual server, I will get a whole new system with a higher limit on the ram.
3. So if I have read everything correctly, you setup the raidz and this is the basis for a volume or multiple volumes. You then create datasets on the volume(s) with or without quotas. Then you can setup shares from there with group access permissions as needed. Do I have this correct or am I still missing something?

I am going to completely replace the whs box as I will soon have a mixture of pc's and apples in the house and I want 1 system to maintain for all the backups and shares. Simple is better. However, I will most likely keep the test box I am setting up a the backup to the main server. I do not backup the individual PC backups, but rather just the documents, photos, music, etc. If a PC dies AND the server go down at the same time, I had better get out of the house as it is on fire or something.

Glad to hear that the transition to FreeNAS was fairly easy coming from WHS. Thanks again.

-Tim

 

[toddos]

Definitely read this. But you have the basic idea right (except volumes, which you have backwards -- a single vdev, or group of drives which in this case is my raid-z1 of 4x3TB drives, cannot span multiple volumes, but a volume can span multiple vdevs).

 

[Reciprocity75]

I think I got it... thanks for the correction. I think it will be much more intuitive once I have the hardware running and delve into the GUI. Thanks again!

 

[Reciprocity75]

Just wanted to send out a quick thanks to toddos. The freenas test box is up and running but not quite as planned. Apparently hardware goes bad... who would have thought that. After struggling for quite some time, I finally determined that 1 of the 3 old, used and abused 500gb hard drives I had laying around is officially dead. It will spin up, but nothing will recognize it. So, I created a 500gb mirror ZFS volume in lieu of the 3 disk raidz1 I was planning on. Oh well, it is just a test system afterall.

I also installed to a usb key instead of the ssd I had laying around. Found a better use for the ssd (lightroom catalog hosting in my photo editing pc) and figured a usb flash drive would suffice. Very glad I made that decision as I do not find the reboot time anoying and the gui is perfectly happy now that I am using firefox to access the server. IE9 defintily has it's issues.

I have setup 1 volume with 4 datasets and shares, 2 users and everything works as planned. So far I am happy with it and really appreciate the easy configuration, once you mess it up a few times that is.

I will stay in test mode for a while as I want to to see how the daily backups perform from a PC, setup snapshots, restore a few files, perform a system restore, etc to ensure I know what I am doing when I need it. I am also shopping for hardware for the actual server... newegg here I come!

Thanks,
Tim