Dead FreeNAS Mini - need advice on recovery

[d1rewolf]

My FreeNAS mini (purchased in Dec 2014) has died. I suspect it's the motherboard. I've cleared CMOS, replaced the battery, to no avail.

The motherboard details:

Make: ASROCK
Model: C2750D4I, REV:G/A 1.01

IPMI is accessible, but the system doesn't boot and there's no VGA output.

At this point, I'm seeking options for either repair or replacement. I reached out to IX but they basically offered no help aside from giving me the MB make/model, telling me they had no inventory and pointed me here....

A few questions:

1. Are replacement boards available for purchase? I'm in a bit of a time crunch, so one I could drop in would be very preferred.
2. If #1 is false and no replacement boards are available, is there an enclosure out there I could buy that would allow me to drop these four drives into it and do a recovery?
3. If #2 is true and there are enclosures which would allow this, do you anticipate any issues if I tried to adopt the filesystem under Linux instead? I'm a Linux guy and always found the differences in FreeBSD to be challenging.
4. If #2 and #3 are false, I might consider purchasing a Truenas Mini X or X+. Should I be able to drop these drives in and move on? Any other thoughts on these two systems?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

d1rewolf

 

[jgreco]

The C2750D4I's had a horrible failure rate due to an Intel flaw. They were replaced as they fell in many cases, but it's now seven or eight years out for that motherboard model. I doubt that iX has the resources to have been doing the repairs on their own, so they were probably RMA'ing the boards back to AsRock Rack. I'm pretty sure this is no longer happening. There is a potential repair available that you can do on your own, but I would airquote "repair"; it is more of a way to extend the life of your system a bit.

You should be able to drop the drives into any other FreeNAS or TrueNAS system and import the pool without issue, but, of course, you may need to reconfigure shares and other configuration data. Those may also come along for free if you can move the boot media over.

You can try importing the filesystem into a ZFS-on-Linux system, but that's slightly dicey. I don't know what "differences" in FreeBSD you found challenging, as FreeNAS is an appliance and your primary interface with it is supposed to be a GUI. If it matters to you, TrueNAS SCALE is also available and is based on Linux. You're still not supposed to be tinkering under the hood, so you "shouldn't really notice."

Almost seven years isn't too bad. It's really at about the point where you might want to consider just buying a new unit and moving on. The Mini's are really nice hardware, so I hear.

I am not an iX employee and I gain nothing of value from that suggestion.

 

[Ericloewe]

1. Are replacement boards available for purchase? I'm in a bit of a time crunch, so one I could drop in would be very preferred.

Direct replacements, mostly no. Maybe used/new old stock, with dubious reliability. But the more recent C3000 stuff should also work very well. You would need new memory, though - but that's going to apply to everything, really.

4. If #2 and #3 are false, I might consider purchasing a Truenas Mini X or X+. Should I be able to drop these drives in and move on? Any other thoughts on these two systems?

Yes, with a config backup. Without one, it'll be slightly more involved, but still easy.

 

[Etorix]

If it's "just" the motherboard and the drives are fine, the pool can be "dropped in" any implementation of ZFS with the right feature flags. TrueNAS is obviously fine, but possibly also OpenZFS on Linux. Though the easiest Linux option would be to wait until TrueNAS SCALE is mature enough for you.

As for #1, which is the most urgent, if you want to keep the enclosure, any mini-ITX board with at least four SATA ports (five with boot drive?) should do. The usual suspects are the Supermicro X10SDV or A2SDi… but these are somewhat expensive, and you may not find them second-hand in a hurry. A new TrueNAS Mini may be worthy of consideration.
Mini-ITX boards based on socketed processors, Intel or AMD, would offer many possibilities but may run too hot for the enclosure, or not fit at all with their cooler—and you'd still want something that is somewhat "server-grade".

 

[d1rewolf]

And...I should have noted, I have sear

The C2750D4I's had a horrible failure rate due to an Intel flaw. They were replaced as they fell in many cases, but it's now seven or eight years out for that motherboard model. I doubt that iX has the resources to have been doing the repairs on their own, so they were probably RMA'ing the boards back to AsRock Rack. I'm pretty sure this is no longer happening. There is a potential repair available that you can do on your own, but I would airquote "repair"; it is more of a way to extend the life of your system a bit.

You should be able to drop the drives into any other FreeNAS or TrueNAS system and import the pool without issue, but, of course, you may need to reconfigure shares and other configuration data. Those may also come along for free if you can move the boot media over.

You can try importing the filesystem into a ZFS-on-Linux system, but that's slightly dicey. I don't know what "differences" in FreeBSD you found challenging, as FreeNAS is an appliance and your primary interface with it is supposed to be a GUI. If it matters to you, TrueNAS SCALE is also available and is based on Linux. You're still not supposed to be tinkering under the hood, so you "shouldn't really notice."

Almost seven years isn't too bad. It's really at about the point where you might want to consider just buying a new unit and moving on. The Mini's are really nice hardware, so I hear.

I am not an iX employee and I gain nothing of value from that suggestion.

Thanks for the response!

To your point on just interacting with the GUI...I always found that so limiting...especially when searching for files/etc.

And, no knock on the hardware or IX....I've gotten many good years out of it as you note, so it's probably time to move on.

One thing I always found very frustrating with it was the slowness of everything...for example, trying to index the filesystem up locate would take days, and almost always fail for unknown reasons (another reason I was digging around under the hood). I suspect much of the slowness is related to the spindles and not the CPU, but do you happen to know if the newer TruNAS minis improve the performance at all?

Thanks in advance!

 

[d1rewolf]

If it's "just" the motherboard and the drives are fine, the pool can be "dropped in" any implementation of ZFS with the right feature flags. TrueNAS is obviously fine, but possibly also OpenZFS on Linux. Though the easiest Linux option would be to wait until TrueNAS SCALE is mature enough for you.

As for #1, which is the most urgent, if you want to keep the enclosure, any mini-ITX board with at least four SATA ports (five with boot drive?) should do. The usual suspects are the Supermicro X10SDV or A2SDi… but these are somewhat expensive, and you may not find them second-hand in a hurry. A new TrueNAS Mini may be worthy of consideration.
Mini-ITX boards based on socketed processors, Intel or AMD, would offer many possibilities but may run too hot for the enclosure, or not fit at all with their cooler—and you'd still want something that is somewhat "server-grade".

Thanks for your response. I may just end up purchasing a TruNAS machine, as that seems like the quickest path and would get me up and running. However, TruNAS SCALE is new to me. A quick review of the marketing looks like it may be more focused on VMs/containers than storage, but if the intent is to be a Debian-based FreeNAS alternative than SIGN ME UP.

What would be ideal is to purchase one of the TruNAS devices and then upgrade to SCALE when it matures...but that leads me to an important question....are these TruNAS Mini X/X+'s future proofed to run SCALE?

Thanks so much!

 

[Redcoat]

What would be ideal is to purchase one of the TruNAS devices and then upgrade to SCALE when it matures...but that leads me to an important question....are these TruNAS Mini X/X+'s future proofed to run SCALE?

Look for posts in the Scale forum by @morganL on these topics. On the hardware I'm sure he answered positively - on the upgrade to Scale his words were a bit more guarded - something suggesting a "lateral" as the objectives of the TrueNAS (storage) and Scale projects were different.

I'm not "into" Scale so I don't have the understanding to provide more insight.

Moving your drives over into a new iX machine would get you up and going quickly and easily I imagine. I had the same machine as you and went through three motherboard replacements before moving away from the small format case and its difficult cooling, so I understand your considerations.

Good luck.

 

[morganL]

Look for posts in the Scale forum by @morganL on these topics. On the hardware I'm sure he answered positively - on the upgrade to Scale his words were a bit more guarded - something suggesting a "lateral" as the objectives of the TrueNAS (storage) and Scale projects were different. I'm not "into" Scale so I don't have the understanding to provide more insight.Moving your drives over into a new Ix machine would get you up and going quickly and easily I imagine. I had the same machine as you and went through three motherboard replacements before moving away from the small format case and its difficult cooling, so I understand your considerations.

Good luck.

Yes, the Minis are upgradeable to SCALE.
There is one issue in the short term, which is enclosure management. Surprisingly Linux is missing a specific driver we need. It should be available in Q1.

 

[d1rewolf]

Thanks for all of your replies. I appreciate it!

It appears that the TruNAS Mini X+ is shipping in around 3-5 weeks. While I fully intend to order one today, I really need to get at some of this data before then. My setup involved 4 disks in the FreeNAS Mini. It's been a long while since I set them up, but I believe they were raidz2.

I have a Dell PowerEdge T30 Server running Ubuntu, but it's drive bays are full. Is anyone aware of a disk enclosure I could purchase which would allow me to at least attempt to recover some of the data (even if I have to boot FreeNAS from USB)? Any other ideas?

Or....does anyone at IX have a way to expedite a build? Because I'll hand you my credit card now ;-)

 

[d1rewolf]

Welp...l bucked up and ordered a TrueNAS Mini XL+. @morganL, if you can do anything to expedite, I'd really appreciate it, but I understand if that's impossible ;-)

 

[Ericloewe]

If you're looking to get the data off, perhaps an HBA with cables running out to the old chassis might work. The biggest challenge would be the cables, which need to be as short as possible and definitely under a meter.