BUILD Building a FreeNAS box

Mark Holtz

Contributor
Joined
Feb 3, 2015
Messages
124
Today is July 30th, 2018... and two years since I brought Vaultron online. Anyone care for an update? ;)

Lets see here... I've only experienced two "major" problems in the two years that I had Vaultron up. The first was the "infant mortality" issue previously mentioned with one of the 5TB drives that failed after 61 hours. The replacement, which went online on August 9th, has been working flawlessly. The second major issue that I experienced is the infamous 11.1-U3 update that took down SMB shares and required rollback to 11.1-U2 to temporarily fix the issue until 11.1-U4 was issued. Other than that, the big reasons for downtime is scheduled upgrades.

Disk storage usage.... I am using 11.1 TiB (44%) with 13.9 TiB available. This lines up with my expectations. It should be noted that the 5TB drives are now discontinued. While I am looking at the 10TB (and larger) drives, it is mostly with wishful thinking. There is no compelling reason to upgrade the drives for another three years at this time.

RAM? I still have no regrets. At the time of purchase, the cost of 64GB of ram with tax and free shipping cost me $399.27. Almost a year afterward, the price shot up to over $800, and when I checked Crucial's website....
RAM_&_SSD_Upgrades__Supermicro_X11SAE-M__Crucial 2018-07-30 00-15-54.png YIKES!

Was 64GB overkill? Maybe, but in this situation, I guess I was both pound-wise and penny-wise. Had I built this box in 2017 instead of 2016, I would had to have gone with 32GB.

A while after I got Vaultron online, I started to point stuff to the shares instead of storing on the local drives. First, it was ShareX and saving the screen saves to Vaultron. When the game Overwatch allowed for the saving of highlights, I changed the default location to a dedicated share. Now, I've been using symbolic linking with several directories so that the data is stored on Vaultron instead of my main computer. Unfortunately, because of an issue with 3DMark and the jar-based menu system, I cannot move the Documents folder over to Vaultron. As for backing the system up, I've been using FreeFileSync to several external drives. Someday, when I get a better Internet connection, I will backup some critical folders to a cloud service.

In hindsight, would I have changed anything with my build? No, not really. Sure, the 128GB nvME is too large as a boot drive, but it was still the smallest I could get. I could have set up my drive array as a RAIDZ3 instead of RAIDZ2, but my data isn't that mission critical.
 

joeschmuck

Old Man
Moderator
Joined
May 28, 2011
Messages
10,994
Thanks for the update. I like the name you gave your NAS, Vaultron, funny. I hope that your next 5 years is free of hardware failures and software glitches.
 

Mark Holtz

Contributor
Joined
Feb 3, 2015
Messages
124
Three years, and it survived a moved from California to Texas in March. Now, it's living in a closet.

Vaultron.png

Only major problem is that Plex went down for a few months as I accidentally blew out the Plex plug-in under the legacy interface, and a FreeNAS defect prevented an install of a Plex interface.
 

Mark Holtz

Contributor
Joined
Feb 3, 2015
Messages
124
It's almost four years now, and I just now had a major repair. One of the four fans was starting to have issues, and while I had the server pulled out while the closet was cleaned, I decided to clean out the accumulated dust and replace the fans. Unfortunately, I miscounted, and only had three replacements instead of four. Oh well.
 

joeschmuck

Old Man
Moderator
Joined
May 28, 2011
Messages
10,994
It's almost four years now, and I just now had a major repair. One of the four fans was starting to have issues, and while I had the server pulled out while the closet was cleaned, I decided to clean out the accumulated dust and replace the fans. Unfortunately, I miscounted, and only had three replacements instead of four. Oh well.
In 4 years you only have to replace a few fans, actually that is pretty good. Give it a few more years and the hard drives will be ready, but they cost a bit more. I'd rather replace fans :)
 

joeschmuck

Old Man
Moderator
Joined
May 28, 2011
Messages
10,994
I'm not looking forward to that bill when it comes. Until then.....
Amen brother! With some luck they will fail one at a time and when you have time and money at the same time to replace them. It's no fun replacing a few drives when your day is already bad.
 

Mark Holtz

Contributor
Joined
Feb 3, 2015
Messages
124
It's coming up on five years now, and thanks to a massive ripping project that lasted several months for the Plex portion, I'm in need or new hard drives. Looking at current pricing....
  • 10TB CMR drives.... were running at $249 when at special, now they're $299 per Amazon.
  • 12TB CMR drives.... were running at $309, now they're $353 per Amazon.
I hate 2020+1.
 

Ericloewe

Server Wrangler
Moderator
Joined
Feb 15, 2014
Messages
20,194
Just wait... If the nonsense storage-based cryptocurrency takes off beyond a short fad, those prices are likely to go way up.
 

Ericloewe

Server Wrangler
Moderator
Joined
Feb 15, 2014
Messages
20,194
Well, they're bad but not horrible yet.
 

Mark Holtz

Contributor
Joined
Feb 3, 2015
Messages
124
Well, they're bad but not horrible yet.

One month later..... and it's a horror show.... :eek:

Meanwhile, I discovered the Cloud Sync Tasks.... and set up a Backblaze storage account for the off-site storage of several critical directories. You can blame this story on WD My Drive Live drives.... and making sure I add a layer of safety.
 

ChrisRJ

Wizard
Joined
Oct 23, 2020
Messages
1,919
Right before the madness began, I was lucky enough to get a Seagate Exos 16 TB for 300 Euros :cool:
 

Mark Holtz

Contributor
Joined
Feb 3, 2015
Messages
124
It's just over five years.... and now one of the original eight 5TB threw an error on Wednesday morning. I take it that if one drive fails, it's a good practice to replace all eight drives. I had been saving up my Amazon gift certificates to cover this moment, but alas, only the 8TB drives are in the range of affordable again at $199 a pop... the 10s and 12s are out-of-stock.
 

Ericloewe

Server Wrangler
Moderator
Joined
Feb 15, 2014
Messages
20,194
There's no urgency in replacing the others as long as they continue to test well. Just have a spare or two on hand in case it's needed.
 

Mark Holtz

Contributor
Joined
Feb 3, 2015
Messages
124
Today's category: "Things you don't want to see in during drive replacement...."

FreeNAS 2021-09-12 09-23-50.png


Good things I set things up under a RAIDZ2 array five years ago.

Thanks to Amazon not allowing me to order more than five 8TB drives, I had to get the three remaining drives from another source. Those won't arrive until Wednesday, September 15th. Plus, I still have the about four old 5 TB drives that I can put back into operation.
 
Top