Expanding Pool - Do I Understand This Right?

[BrianAz1]

I just set up my first volume in FreeNAS to host my movie rips. I configured 5x2TB in raidz2, then I extended that volume with another 5x2TB. This leaves me with 10.6TB available. I split it like this to avoid having to purchase 10 disks if I want to expand in the future and keep it all in the same volume. I'm using raidz2 because I've experienced two drive failures on a prior 5-drive Raid5 setup and lost everything. Everything seems to be working well so far but please let me know if I've misunderstood anything.

Also, I'd like to confirm if I wanted to extend my volume again, could I do it with 5x1TB in raidz2? I have some laying around that I'd like to use before buying more disks.


Thanks,
Brian

 

[peterh]

Your estimate looks correct. 2 out of 5 (40%) disks is used as checksum. Maybe using 6 discs per vdev would be slightly more optimal ( 2 groups with 6 discs each) where 33% is used for checksum.

In zfs terminlogy, each group is a vdev

You can add another vdev with 5 ( or 6 ) 1TB disks, it's not optimal but it works. Make shure however that you have equal number of disks in each vdev.

 

[BrianAz1]

Thanks! Now I just need to figure out why I am getting these ridiculous ahci timeout errors. Happens on FreeNAS and FreeBSD 9 using zfs. I think it's either my hard drives or controller. I need to find a cheap known-to-work sata II/III eSata card with PM support.

 

[peterh]

is freenas 8.04 also experiencing ahci timeouts ?

 

[BrianAz1]

Not sure, will give it a try today. My current controller is a rr622 HighPoint. I've only seen one other thread with a similar issue. The guy moved to a sil3132 card and was ok. If 8.04 doesn't work, that may be my next move.

Other thread: http://freebsd.1045724.n5.nabble.co...-from-HighPoint-RocketRaid-622-td4951552.html

 

[BrianAz1]

Just tried FreeNAS 8.04p3 and encountered the same errors when attempting to copy:


Aug 3 14:41:30 freenas kernel: ahcich0: Timeout on slot 2 port 2
Aug 3 14:41:30 freenas kernel: ahcich0: is 00000000 cs 0000e738 ss ffffffff rs ffffffff tfd 50 serr 00400000
Aug 3 14:41:30 freenas kernel: ahcich0: ... waiting for slots 0000e73a
Aug 3 14:41:30 freenas kernel: ahcich0: Timeout on slot 1 port 3
Aug 3 14:41:30 freenas kernel: ahcich0: is 00000000 cs 0000e738 ss ffffffff rs ffffffff tfd 50 serr 00400000
Aug 3 14:41:30 freenas kernel: ahcich0: ... waiting for slots 0000e738
Aug 3 14:41:30 freenas kernel: ahcich0: Timeout on slot 5 port 1
Aug 3 14:41:30 freenas kernel: ahcich0: is 00000000 cs 0000e738 ss ffffffff rs ffffffff tfd 50 serr 00400000
Aug 3 14:41:30 freenas kernel: ahcich0: ... waiting for slots 0000e718

The xfer hangs after a certain number of these errors. Are there any other details which may be helpful? I've currently got only one pool of 5x2TB for testing. Some commercial Seagate, Samsung & Hitachi drives in an enclosure w/ the HighPoint 622 card.

Thanks for the help,
Brian


Edit: Just ordered one of these : http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=559
Should be here Monday. Hoping for the best.

Edit #2: I think I have two issues here.... First is the 622 controller, and second I think there is a firmware issue with one of my drives in one of my pool. Appearantly the Samsung EcoGreen F4 drives get bad blocks if you're using smart. After I figure out this controller issue, I think I'll be able to solve this other issue with a firmware upgrade of the disk.

 

[BrianAz1]

A quick update: I took one of my 5x2TB disk pools (all Hitachi 0F10311) out of the enclosure and hooked the disks direct to the motherboard controller (GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3R - Intel ICH10R). Copied 60+ GB of movies to and from the pool with zero errors/timeouts! I then moved the disks back to the enclosure (therefore going through the RR622) and tried to copy the same files to/from and ran into the timeouts immediately.

So, this seems to confirm my suspicions about the HighPoint RR 622 card causing at least some of my problems. When the new controller (Sil3132) arrives on Monday, I'm thinking I should have this pool up and operating in the enclosure. Then I'll be moving on to the suspected firmware issue with the Samsung drive and swapping out the second RR622 controller.


One last note - I also ran into some issues when I tried to connect to my FreeNAS CIFS share from my OSX workstation. Turns out I can copy to Windows shares on Windows machines ok from OSX, but trying to copy from from OSX to FreeNAS CIFS fails. I guess I'll look into creating an AFP share to use from OSX.

- Brian

 

[BrianAz1]

Was out today and came across a Dynex sil3132 dual-eSata card at best buy on clearance for $7.80! Popped it in and copied ~ 80GB to and from both enclosures (on the same card) without a single error. So to summarize... Highpoint RR622 and zfs don't mix. The samsung drive turned out to not be an issue.