Advice on current Build - Will it FreeNAS well?

[RevCivic]

Motherboard - Supermicro X9DR-F+
CPUs - (2) XEON 2670 10c
RAM - 8x8GB Samsung 1600 DDR3
SATA Expansion - Adaptec 24 SATA Card

I have 2 iStarUSA Cages as well to add an extra 8 bays to the 6 Internal Slots I have.

I have been running FreeNAS 11+ with little problems for a while now. When I initially set it up, I had issues importing data from my windows machine. I used an external hard drive, and the copy of 2TB of data over USB 2.0 took about 4 days.

Recently, I started cleaning up my Pools, and working on eliminating my questionable hard drives. I currently have 2 Pools, both about 10TB of space. One of them has about 7TB used. All of my questionable drives have been removed. Part of the 7TB currently residing in the pool came from a drive from a friend (4TB), I hooked the drive up to a SATA 6 port, and the import (rsync) of the disc took about 10 full days (the 4TB drive was basically full).

I spoke to a friend who believes I may throttled by IO r/w. Whenever I try to write over the network in bulk, my network drops almost instantly. I am trying to resynch my libraries for plex, but with this limitation on writing, I will be copying for weeks. I feel as though my components should be able to handle the desired tasks.

When it was running good it was very much a sit it and forget it deal.

So the basic questions:

Should it be able to FreeNAS better than I am currently experiencing?
Should it be able to Plex using FreeNAS?
Is using FreeNAS overkill for my goal of a plex server?

Thanks all for any input. I hope I have provided enough information.

Also, I am currently running the latest stable update of 11.2

 

[Chris Moore]

SATA Expansion - Adaptec 24 SATA Card

No. Absolutely not. This is not to be used with FreeNAS or ZFS at all, not ever. If you already bought it, sell it. If you didn't buy it, don't.
Disk redundancy in FreeNAS is handled by the file system, ZFS, you can read about it here:

Overview of ZFS Pools in FreeNAS from the iXsystems blog:
https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/zfs-pools-in-freenas/

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer
https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/

Read the hardware guide:

FreeNAS® Quick Hardware Guide
https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/freenas®-quick-hardware-guide.7/

Hardware Recommendations Guide Rev. 1e) 2017-05-06
https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/

Hardware Recommendations by @cyberjock - from 26 Aug 2014 - and still valid
https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/hardware-recommendations-read-this-first.23069/

 

[Chris Moore]

I spoke to a friend who believes I may throttled by IO r/w. Whenever I try to write over the network in bulk, my network drops almost instantly. I am trying to resynch my libraries for plex, but with this limitation on writing, I will be copying for weeks. I feel as though my components should be able to handle the desired tasks.

If you are using that Adaptec card, it is probably a big part of your problem. We need more details on exactly what you did when you set this up.

 

[Chris Moore]

I have 2 iStarUSA Cages as well to add an extra 8 bays to the 6 Internal Slots I have.

This really doesn't give us much detail to work from. Take a look at this post to give you some additional ideas for what we would need to know:
https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/forum-guidelines.45124

 

[RevCivic]

I have one of these 5 Drive Bay cages, and one of these 3 Drive Bay Cages.

I currently have the adaptec set up as a JBOD, and have FreeNAS Handling all the redundancy. Many of my drives are SAS drives, so using an adapter from the card (SFF>SAS). I had read AFTER buying the card that you shouldn't use RAID cards for RAID, I can remove it this evening. I have all of my data backed up on to drives that are currently not in the system.

If I were to remove the RAID card, would you say this system should be able to FreeNAS?

I have another similar build at work that does not use a RAID card and seems to work perfectly fine (Though sometimes very long transfers will time out), but I also am not running PLEX on it. Only ZoneMinder and the rest of the machine is used for file storage.

To summarize, I will remove the RAID card, reinstall freeNAS, and see if it performs any better. Thanks for the advice!

 

[Chris Moore]

If I were to remove the RAID card, would you say this system should be able to FreeNAS?

If you look at the spec of my Emily-NAS in my signature (just click the button) you will see that the CPU and RAM are not that different from what you are using. It absolutely should function reliably as a FreeNAS system. I would like to know the model of drive you are using, the quantity of drives and the type of pool you have configured. Details matter. Your network transfer is going to be limited to the 1Gb speed of your network interface, which should be the slowest link in your chain. If you are not fully saturating that connection, there is a problem with the configuration. The system board, processor and RAM you have should be fine, but that RAID card is a definite problem and we don't know anything about your drives.

 

[RevCivic]

I have:
(1) 2TB WD Black
(1) 12TB WD Gold
(1) 10TB WD Red
(4) 2TB Seagate Constellation Drives (SAS Drives)

the 10TB and 12TB are for backing up & Migrating Pools. i did have (8) Seagate Constellations, but they started dropping like flies recently. So I am trying to get some larger drives in either WD Red or Seagate IronWolf drives.

Tonight I will remove the RAID card and post my results with such.
Thanks for all the help, it makes me much less frustrated having something to try.

 

[RevCivic]

I know it has been some time, ran into some cable issues when I was removing drives from the RAID card. Ordered some cables and got it down to only 3 drives using the RAID card, but I need to search for my XFX power cables before I can remove the other 3.

On a more upsetting note for me, after doing so, I am stuck in Supermicro's "B2" bios code. From what my googling has left me to believe, this is an issue with either the boot device, or the BIOS, I am going to remake my boot device tonight, if that doesn't work, I either need to flash/reprogram my bios or get a new motherboard.

Just wanted to update though since it has been a bit since I had said I was going to remove the RAID card. I'm curious to know if you think having LESS on the RAID card will be better, or if just having the RAID card in the pcie slot is damning enough.

Thanks!

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

Just wanted to update though since it has been a bit since I had said I was going to remove the RAID card. I'm curious to know if you think having LESS on the RAID card will be better, or if just having the RAID card in the pcie slot is damning enough.

The card on its own with nothing attached to it isn't a problem. Any pool making use of vdevs supported by drives connected to that RAID card though may create additional risk for that pool.