Asus ts-mini Home Server iSCSI issues

[Ben Krause]

I have an Asus TS-mini home server which originally had Windows Home Server running on it and I want to use it essentially as an iSCSI target. I have 2x 3TB hard drives in it that I want to stripe into one large drive.

I was able to get the whole system setup and working but I keep running into an issue where when I'm running my backups to this device, they stall after some time. I get up to 50MB/sec transfer rates and it fluctuates up and down like you might expect. But then after about 10 minutes of backing up the backup stalls. It's almost like it's overwhelmed and I can't even access the drive by going to my computer.

I know my TS-Mini is very low powered compared to what I've seen for recommended specs. So my question is: Is there a way to make FreeNAS work reliably and fast with this setup by tuning some settings or is it just too under powered?

Here are the specs of the TS-Mini
Single Core Intel Atom Processor N280 1.66Ghz w/HyperThreading
1GB of Memory
2x 3TB WD Hard Drives

I can't add anymore ram because there are no ram slots as the memory is soldered to the board. All I want to do is use this device as an iSCSI target so that I can backup my backups. If FreeNAS is not the way to go with this setup, can someone recommend a better system? My requirements is that the system needs to run from the USB stick like FreeNAS does, it needs to be reliable and it needs to be fast (20-50MB/sec transfer rates).

Just in case anyone cares, I have tried setting up both a ZFS and a UFS volume in a Striped Raid and I also tried using Extents that used the physical drive (instead of a file) so that Windows could see both drives and created a striped volume under diskmgmt.msc and I got the same stalling results that I mentioned above.

Thanks.

 

[DJ9]

Use something else like Nas4Free? Your system specs don't meet the minimum requirements for UFS, which is 2GB of ram, and 8GB for ZFS.

 

[cyberjock]

Actually, I think NAS4Free requires 2GB minimum too. :(

 

[DJABE]

I'm currently running NAS4Free configured as iSCSI target on:
FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE-p3 (kern.osreldate: 902001)
NAS4Free 9.2.0.1 - Shigawire (revision 943)
x86-embedded on AMD Athlon(tm) XP 3200+
nVidia-nForce
RAM usage: 15% of 1287MiB (1.5GB installed, I believe BSD/NAS takes the rest during bootup).

3 disks which differ in size, even interface (both PATA and SATA).
Using iSCSI targets as UFS mounts.

You can try something similar on your hardware.

But remember - such setup does not have any protection (no mirror, no parity, no ECC ram etc). Do a backup daily!

 

[tweekedinsd]

Hi, I do have an Asus TS-Mini server and I did try to use freeNAS on it via a flash drive but system can only handle the 32-bit freeNAS edition with limited capabilities. Just a heads up this motherboard is out of a low end workstation so they used off the shelf hardware to build this machine. I actually cut off the part of the sticker that is covering up the VGA port and I have connected a monitor to it. I went back and installed Windows Server 2008 R2 32-bit edition and it works fine for what I need it to do but I was getting frustrated with the limited capability of the RAM because I thought it was soldered to the board until I pulled out the motherboard. The RAM slot is on the backside of the motherboard and is not visible or accessible from the front side. So the RAM is up-gradable 2GB, it is a difficult thing to do.