Confirming process & design for FreeNAS box

[DJVege]

G'day all.

I'll be setting up my first FreeNAS system in the next week or 2 and have been reading through all the install doco and posts. I just wanted to confirm my understanding of how I should set this up, and whether it is the best way for what I'll be using it for.

Purpose: Storage for Media (movies, videos, photos, etc...)
Require: Reliability & Availability at a reasonable cost, maximise space (This doesn't include backups. That will be step 2, later).
Current Network/Devices: Billion 7800N. HTPC running XBMC on Win7x64 ultimate; Gaming PC running Winx64 ultimate. XBMC reads and writes to NAS. Gaming PC copies videos over to NAS. (So I'll be interested in the sabnzbd PBi later on :) I really need to check what PBi stands for. I know what it is... just not the acronym stands for). Everything connected at 1Gbps.
Hardware: AW8-Max mobo; 8GB RAM; P4 640 3.20GHz 64bit CPU; 3 x 3TB SATA3 WD Greens; 2 x 4GB Sandisk Cruz flash drives

Thoughts for FreeNAS setup:

* RAIDZ1 (2+1) = 6GB useable space
* Create a volume, AND then a dataset so I can set permissions etc... for XBMC to read and write to it.
* Create an NFS share for this dataset. I've read NFS is best for transfer speeds. If that's true, will I have any issues connecting to this share from my Win7 machines?? Would CIFS be better suited?

Can anyone see any issues with the above? All suggestions are very welcome. Although I HAVE used fedora/redhat before, you can consider me primarily a Windows user, so feel free to use small words and long explanations. :)

Thanks.

...DJVege...

 

[survive]

HI DJVege,

I don't see any problems with what you are looking to do. You have enough RAM, which is the big thing for doing ZFS. Don't see many 955 boards around anymore....I sure do miss Abit.

You should do fine with CIFS, I wouldn't worry to much about getting NFS going with your windows boxes. Depending on the version of Windows 7 you have NFS might not be included (I think you get an NFS client with Enterprise & Ultimate).

I'm not sure what NIC's are on-board but since you have PCI-e 1x slots you can always put in a $30 Intel "CT" card if you find the network is giving you trouble....an Intel NIC an be the cure for many network troubles.

-Will

 

[DJVege]

I have Win7 Ultimate. Only reason I was thinking NFS was XBMC states it is faster for transfer, and so do the forums here. On my previous NAS, DNS-343, even on a Gbps link, I'd only get 10MB/s steady transfer rate from my Gaming PC.

I should add that my Gaming PC is connected to the NAS via LAN, and the HTPC is connected via wireless. I get 5-6mbps stable for transfers over wireless, which is fine for 1080p files up to around 15GB. Larger than that and you MIGHT start hitting "buffering" issues every 15 minutes or so.

Cheers for the info, Will. Especially on the Intel Nic suggestion.

 

[DJVege]

Another question as my reading continues...

Chunk/Block size!!

I've read 2 articles with different suggestions!

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/chunks-the-hidden-key-to-raid-performance/130 - large I/Os = small chunk size (512b - 8KB); small I/Os = large chunk size (64KB+)
http://www.macworld.com/article/1057858/june07geekfactor.html - Beefy video & audio files = large chunk size (256KB); small text/database files = small chunk size (~16KB)

I was thinking of setting mine at 4KB as I'll have mostly video files from 700MB -> 17GB each.

 

[survive]

Hi DJVege,

I don't think you really need to worry about chunk\block size with ZFS. With a hardware\old school RAID block size mattered because the RAID used a fixed block size and if the data size differed greatly from the block size there was more work to be done, for example writing a small file out to a RAID-5 with a big block size might require a megabyte or more of data to be read, parity computed & re-written do disk. ZFS avoids the whole problem by using a variable block size.

I think the best thing you can do for the HTPC is to get it off wireless if that is at all an option.

-Will

 

[DJVege]

Ah ok. Sorry, I thought I read I had to set a block size for RaidZ.

Yeah, wireless is the option at the moment just due to the location of theatre/lounge room. A cable would go across the entry corridor if I switched to LAN.

Wireless works nicely at the moment, but I will move to wired for the HTPC when I move to the next house.

Thanks again.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

You could just have an NFS share on your media files for xbmc, and another CIFS share on the same media files for windows to connect to. Really you could do whatever you want, there are ways to access nfs from windows, but CIFS is the prefered method.

I personally use NFS for xbmc, and CIFS for windows (when I am forced to use it).

 

[DJVege]

Ok, thanks. I wasn't aware we could setup both NFS and CIFS shares for the same dataset. I couldn't on the old dlink NAS. :)

Thanks Joshua.