Cyberjock's review of the FreeNAS Mini

[cyberjock]

So here's my review of the FreeNAS Mini.

http://cyberj0ck.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/my-review-of-the-freenas-mini-part-1/

Plenty of you have PMed me asking when I'd get one. Here it is in all of its glory.

 

[DJ9]

If you really hate it, send me a pm and I'll give you my address. Oh, include the swag also. ;)

 

[joelmusicman]

Really great write-up, CyberJock! I'm definitely getting Avoton-envy, though my G3220 serves my needs pretty well. If it supported VT-d it'd be the bee's knees! I agree that 4 drives would result in a pretty small pool though. I'd like to see a 6 or 8 bay enclosure (like the ones offered by U-NAS) to take advantage of the c2750d4i's 12 SATA ports...

 

[Fox]

How power hungry was it under various loads?

 

[cyberjock]

Fox, the highest wattage I ever saw on my watt-meter was 64w.

 

[joelmusicman]

So what shenanigans are you experiencing in 9.2.1.5? I'm still running .4...

 

[cyberjock]

CIFS won't come on/off without a patch on 9.2.1.5. My advice is to stick with .4 until you get to .6.

The big guns are coming out for 9.2.1.6.. I'll be testing 9.2.1.6 within the next 24 hours on my Mini. ;)

 

[crisman]

CIFS won't come on/off without a patch on 9.2.1.5. My advice is to stick with .4 until you get to .6.

The big guns are coming out for 9.2.1.6.. I'll be testing 9.2.1.6 within the next 24 hours on my Mini. ;)

Hi Cyberjock,

Do you have any confirmation that 9.2.1.6 is coming out in the next 24h?

 

[cyberjock]

Nope. In fact, I don't have an ETA on when 9.2.1.6 will hit RELEASE. There's nightly betas that exist on the server if you want to give it a try. I'll be upgrading to the beta so I can try to break it and make the iX developers earn their paycheck. ;)

They're thoroughly dissatisfied with the quality of the 9.2.1.x releases and they want to be done with them. I want them to be done with them so I can upgrade(I'm still on 9.2.0), and it's just a matter of getting the right amount of testing and bug fixing to make 9.2.1.6 be "the" release. Few people are testing these betas because of the fear of problems. Those fears are completely justified as of late, but I'm using 9.2.1.5 on my Mini and after the patch it seems to basically work exactly how I'd expect it with one exception.. I can't mount CIFS shares right now. Even as root it *should* be working. But since I've got some real-life stuff going on it's on the backburner while I deal with this stuff. I'm convinced this is user-error though because others are using CIFS without a problem.

 

[joeschmuck]

Very nice writeup and very complete. I'm glad you took the time to give us a treat like this. I too wasn't thrilled with the first FreeNAS Mini that came out but this is the proper machine that should have been released in the first place. I like the DOM card. To lower the temperature, is it in a good airflow area and if not, you could use a short SATA cable to relocate it into a better airflow if desired, although it being basically a SSD, the temperature isn't alarming to me.

 

[KempelofDoom]

With the number of SATA ports available on that mobo, why not use the extra pci slot to run 2 sff 8088 ports and hook up some more drives? Do you have the hardware to test that? I'm curious since I know several people that will love this device and want to expand outside 4 drives but not have a rack to mount the larger platforms.

BTW, great review. I noticed too that cifs works much faster than on windows. Never understood that.

 

[joelmusicman]

Very nice writeup and very complete. I'm glad you took the time to give us a treat like this. I too wasn't thrilled with the first FreeNAS Mini that came out but this is the proper machine that should have been released in the first place. I like the DOM card. To lower the temperature, is it in a good airflow area and if not, you could use a short SATA cable to relocate it into a better airflow if desired, although it being basically a SSD, the temperature isn't alarming to me.

I agree about the SSD being over 40 not a big deal in and of itself, but I think the bigger issue is that it'll affect the temperature warnings for the other drives.

 

[cyberjock]

@KempleofDoom

I didn't really consider it. I'm not sure what I'd actually be testing if I added more disks except higher speeds(which I tried to accommodate for with my SSD tests). Generally the Mini is a great product if you want something that is all-contained. If you want to go to more than the 4 disk configuration I wouldn't recommend you go with a Mini just because the main attraction for the Mini is its small size. If you planned to attach a bunch of drives you should probably go with a rackmount or equivalent.

 

[cyberjock]

I agree about the SSD being over 40 not a big deal in and of itself, but I think the bigger issue is that it'll affect the temperature warnings for the other drives.

Actually, I've had some real-world testing of my Mini in my living room the last few days. I have no A/C for the main part of the house, and it's already been over 80F in my living room. The hard drives have stayed cool and the temp of the memory stick only went up 1C. I have gotten an email on every bootup(which does kind of suck), but since you *should* be triggering the bootup yourself its something that you should expect and be somewhat comfortable with.

 

[Ken Wood]

So here's my review of the FreeNAS Mini.

http://cyberj0ck.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/my-review-of-the-freenas-mini-part-1/

Plenty of you have PMed me asking when I'd get one. Here it is in all of its glory.

Very good review. I now have warm-fuzzies for iX Systems. My customer will be happy.
kaw

 

[cyberjock]

Glad you liked it. Many people were asking for my opinions of the Mini. I think it's a heck of a box IMO.

 

[bestboy]

Great review, especially the "red lining" tests.
As a suggestion: maybe you could also do a little bit benchmarking of the original setup, too. I guess it's pretty safe to assume that the 1GB link(s) can be saturated easily. But what about a 10GB NIC? What throughput can the pool with the WD Reds sustain when the link is not the limiting factor?

 

[cyberjock]

What "original" setup are you talking about? The base system with the Reds? I didn't do that and I explained why in my review... everyone has done that and if you are doing 10Gb with WD Reds you're limited by what the Reds can do anyway(which changes from year to year and firmware to firmware).

 

[bestboy]

if you are doing 10Gb with WD Reds you're limited by what the Reds can do anyway.

Yep, and I'm kind of curious about what the pool can do. Do you think it is possible to get the Mini to do 300 MB/s via 10 GBE?

 

[cyberjock]

Yep, and I'm kind of curious about what the pool can do. Do you think it is possible to get the Mini to do 300 MB/s via 10 GBE?

If you want to do RAID0, sure you could do that.

This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how well the Mini can handle itself. The Mini isn't the limitation here in other words. The hard drives are.