BUILD Building my own freenas server

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jonandermb

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Hi! I'm about to build a server with these components:

MOTHERBOARD AM3 GIGABYTE GA-870A-USB3 x1
MEMORY DDR3 ECC KINGSTON 8GB 1333 x2
RACK 19” COOLBOX 4U x1
NIC TP-LINK TG-3269 10/100/1000M PCI x1
PROCESSOR AMD FX4130 X4 3.8GHz (BOX) AM3+ x1
PENDRIVE 8GB KINGSTON DATATRAVELER SE9 METAL (FOR SYSTEM) x1
VGA AMD MSI R5450 1GB GDDR3 x1
RACK 5 HD ICYDOCK BACKPLANE MB-455SPF x1
HD SATA3 4TB SEAGATE 64MB ST4000DM00 x4
POWER SUPPLY 550W FSP RAIDER 80PLUS PFC x1

The purpose of this server would be AFP and samba shares over a small office network, with 2 to 3 concurrent clients. The extra NIC would be used to make a bonding with the nic that comes integrated on the motherboard.

Any opinions? Thanks!!!!
 

cyberjock

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First: AFP and Samba for the same files is a bad idea.. its in the manual

Second: That motherboard isn't "server-grade" and therefore isn't going to be recommended.
 

jonandermb

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Samba and afp are going to be of different volumes, not for the same one.
I'll try to check another motherboard, though.

Thanks for your input
 

cyberjock

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I'd go with a Supermicro board. I'm a big fan of Gigabyte myself. They make great desktop boards. Server-boards.. not my recommendation.
 

jonandermb

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I'm trying to introduce freenas to my company for once and for all: After years having to discard the idea of a Dell nas because of its exagerated price, I want this to be as economic as possible, not sacrificing stability: That's why I went with ECC all the way without hesitating (i've been reading you guys for the past days in order to build a decent server). This is something for the company I work in but it's also something personal: Until now, we are storing all the data on a lacie 2Big Disk with only one GB nic and a raid0 setup: Cheap but I don't sleep well at night for the obvious reasons, since the well being and maintenance of the data is my entire responsability. Until now, I have been considering that disk will fail any day, that's why I'm performing periodic backups to an external USB disk.... but enough is enough....
I have been testing this last months on a dell power edge 2950 with only 4Gb RAM (we discussed the percs of this setup in another post some time ago) - i know it's far from optimal, but it's working for now. One thing, though, is that I should've gone with UFS instead of ZFS with this server. A bit off-topic: UFS appears as "legacy" on the most recent versions of freenas: Is it scheduled to dissapear anytime or is UFS always going to stay there for us to choose between this filesystem or ZFS? And also... does UFS support raid as ZFS does? On the "old" 2950 server I don't need snapshots or any other features ZFS brings....
Thanks!
 

jonandermb

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Oh, another question: I'm thinking about including a USB 3.0 card so I can plug some external disks from time to time for backup purposes or for adding temporary disks to my pool.
I've read USB 3.0 is not supported but... is it not supported for the system usb unit or just globally not working at all? If it' the first case, which hw should I install ion order to have USB 3.0?
 

jonandermb

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How about an intel motherboard with a i3 4130? Dual core at 3.4
Anyway, not many concurrent users....
 

cyberjock

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1. UFS is going away. I take that to mean you will no longer be able to use media with UFS in the future. Frankly, you might have wished you had gone with UFS, but you're like 1 release away from UFS being gone. So you'd forever be stuck on that version. I think you made the right choice with ZFS, but 4GB of RAM is just asking to lose the pool suddenly one day.

2. USB3 drivers for FreeBSD aren't very mature. For some hardware it works flawlessly, for others it's nothing but crashes. I don't recommend USB3 at all because there's no guarantee it will work today or in the immediate future. USB really isn't the most ideal for backups as FreeNAS really isn't designed to handle pools that are going to be appearing and disappearing randomly. Not to mention:

1. All the people that have tried to use USB and lost data as a result.
2. The inadequacy to recover from a sector read or write error
3. The inability for many drives to support SMART.

USB is great for that "I need to put data on the server", but as a long term solution its quite risky. Even people that have tried to use USB for backups only have found their backups were bad when they needed them the most.
 

jonandermb

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I finally went with an intel mobo .. i'll have my new server in a couple of days... can't wait for it!!!!!!!
I'm still doubting whether to go with RADIZ1 and get 12 Tb plus the spare disk or RAIDZ2 and play it safe: 8 Tb but with double redundancy... I have read (almost) all the articles over here: I know the recommended setup would be RAIDZ2, but i'd also appreciate those extra 4tb...... anyway, I have 3 days or so to make up my mind, i guess...
Thanks for your advice.
 

ser_rhaegar

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If you're using large consumer drives, RAIDZ2 is a much better choice. Consumer drives typically have a 1E14 URE chance which equates to about 1 error in every 12 TB read. If you do RAIDZ1 and have a drive die, you will most likely hit a URE in the rebuild and lose all your data.
 

jgreco

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"lose all your data" is very pessimistic. That is unlikely but admittedly not entirely impossible. For a data block, you lose the file data. For a metadata block, you lose whatever was dependent on that metadata, except that metadata is often stored in duplicate so "maybe not."

ZFS can also do that for data blocks with copies=N of course.

see https://blogs.oracle.com/relling/entry/zfs_copies_and_data_protection
 
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Excuse me for dropping in here but for some quick clarification: URE means a drive can't read a sector for the heck of it cause it has gone bad and therefore gives up reading there?
 

HoneyBadger

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Excuse me for dropping in here but for some quick clarification: URE means a drive can't read a sector for the heck of it cause it has gone bad and therefore gives up reading there?

Bingo. Unrecoverable Read Error means exactly what it says on the tin - the data there is gone for whatever reason, be it magical magnetic forces or physical platter defect - the drive just can't read from that specific spot.

UREs in a healthy zpool or array aren't as critical because ZFS or the controller can say "Crap, rebuild that data from elsewhere and push a warning upstream to say this drive had an issue." Sometimes that means the device gets tagged as failed.

But in a resilver of a RAIDZ1 where you already have a failed drive ... well, you might have just gotten your second failed drive. Ruh roh.
 

jonandermb

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Don't worry... more input for me to learn!! In two days I'll have my machine,. i'm quite excited!!!
A question I have to ask: I know it's not a good practice to use USB drives and use them as storage, mostly because USB drives are intended to be detached sooner or later but... Imagine we don't live in a perfect reality and I must plug a usb, copy some data and "extract" the disk, in order to plug it on a regular basis, rsync some data into it and take it away again.... I tried to do so with a USB drive - UFS filesystem. Then, after extracting the volume, I pluged again, and auto import detected a new storage, empty... I guess I did something wrong there... didn't I?
 

HoneyBadger

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As cyberjock said previously:

Even people that have tried to use USB for backups only have found their backups were bad when they needed them the most.

I'd stick with network-based file moving. Given the unreliability of USB 3.0 in FreeNAS, it will actually be faster to go over the network than use USB 2.0 (1Gbps vs 480Mbps)
 

jonandermb

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Ok, so, the server is up and running :)
Finally, I went with 4x4Tb HDD RAIDZ1 which provides for 7.4 Tb of storage, load balance network... the only thing is that, when I go to reporting, the free memory is 600 Mb (out of the 16Gb), swap usage is zero.... time to upgrade the RAM?
 
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