Explorer / Media Player crash while using shared folder.

[Killjoy7]

This is my first attempt on FreeNAS. I installed FreeNAS on an 8GB usb stick, and created a volume of 4x2TB drives = 5.3TB, using ZFS raid-z ... I wanna be able to save videos/photos on the server and open them from the network. By reading the how-to and manuals I managed to set the whole thing up (maybe I hit a few more ticks than needed) and the sharing appeared to be fully functional. Viewable from my win7 PC, permissions ok in order to write on it, copying speed of 31-34 MB/s using gigabit ethernet...

Now, there are 2 sides of the same coin...

1) I will double click on the folder with videos/photos in it, it opens, it starts scanning the files (for properties etc, the green bar on the address area) and it takes forever. I right click on a file it takes about 2-3 secs to open the menu. I open a video with WMP it takes 10+ secs for it to load, it plays for a few secs and it freezes, I move the video forward it crashes... Photos with windows viewer take about the same time to open.

2) Some other times everything will work fine. I will open the folder, files will show up quickly, menus open fast. I load a video with VLC it starts in less than 2 secs, ffw, stopping, closing the vid all work great. Photos open fast. Everything ok. I try to play the same file with WMP... it crashes, again.

Also I have noticed 2 more things. First, when the files are in thumbnail mode(small - big doesn't matter), it has way bigger chances for the explorer to crash than when files are shown in list or detail mode. Secondly, when the explorer crashes the whole PC crashes, it takes a couple of mins for it to get things back together. No folder loads, My Computer shows no devices, loads forever e.t.c.

I run a decent PC with a Core i7 2600k, an SSD vertex 3 120GB and 16gb of 1600Mhz ram on win7.
FreeNAS has been set up using a 2.4Ghz Celeron D, 2GB of Ram, 4x2TB WD Green Sata2 drives and a usb 8GB stick on an asus m/b with a pci gigabit lan card.

they are connected through a 3com gigabit switch.

I have tried all of the above using another PC with Win7 and the same things happen. Have also tried different codecs for WMP (K-Lite and Shark007). ssdc...

Tell me if you need any more info to help you think up something, like screens of my FreeNAS config, or any errors that pop on the console...

Thanks in advance for any help you may offer on my issue.

 

[Killjoy7]

More info...

These are the console errors during the tries with WMP...

Oct 21 01:22:33 freenas kernel: ahcich3: Timeout on slot 23 port 0
Oct 21 01:22:33 freenas kernel: ahcich3: is 00000000 cs 01800000 ss 00000000 rs 01800000 tfd 4051 serr 00000000
Oct 21 01:23:07 freenas kernel: ahcich3: Timeout on slot 25 port 0
Oct 21 01:23:07 freenas kernel: ahcich3: is 00000000 cs 06000000 ss 00000000 rs 06000000 tfd 4051 serr 00000000
Oct 21 01:23:58 freenas kernel: ahcich3: Timeout on slot 30 port 0
Oct 21 01:23:58 freenas kernel: ahcich3: is 00000000 cs c0000000 ss 00000000 rs c0000000 tfd 4051 serr 00000000
Oct 21 01:24:32 freenas kernel: ahcich3: Timeout on slot 0 port 0
Oct 21 01:24:32 freenas kernel: ahcich3: is 00000000 cs 00000003 ss 00000000 rs 00000003 tfd 4051 serr 00000000
Oct 21 01:25:25 freenas kernel: ahcich3: Timeout on slot 0 port 0
Oct 21 01:25:25 freenas kernel: ahcich3: is 00000000 cs 00000003 ss 00000000 rs 00000003 tfd 4051 serr 00000000

And here are the config images...

Volume
CIFS
CIFS Share

 

[ProtoSD]

This looks like more of a hardware / kernel issue than settings being wrong.

 

[Durkatlon]

Ah, more AHCI time-outs... *groan*

 

[Killjoy7]

Thanks for the inputs so far guys!

I tried the following...

1) After "googling" the timeouts issue I found that in some cases setting the SATA Drives to AHCI mode helped. Did that, it was set to IDE.

2) I destroyed my raid-z config and tried other ones. I created both UFS mirror and stripe, and the server worked perfectly. Videos loading fast, 2 videos playing at the same time with VLC and WMP, great response time while moving randomly through the vids...

3) I created a raid-z2 volume and things worked ok too.

4) After all those successful tries I created a raid-z volume, again. Everything seemed ok. Videos opening fast, dual playing again... but the response time at random clicks was degrading as time passed. So I decided to close both players and load a 720p video. That's where all hell broke loose... The vid "lagged" every 2 secs, video/audio distortion, like when you try to play a 1080p video while unzipping a file, writing a dvd and playing a game, all at the same time and ofc afterwards the system crashed again along with WMP... without any errors in console though

...Could it be that my mobo's raid controller doesn't work well with a raid-z config?
...you think a bios update would help?
...setting the drives to raid mode, rather than ahci or ide?

 

[Durkatlon]

That seems very weird that the problem would be specific to the type of redundancy you pick, or even the type of filesystem (UFS/ZFS). This is really more of a hardware issue, caused by incompatibilities between either the drives, but more likely the SATA controller, and FreeBSD8.2 (and by extension FreeNAS8).

Is it possible that when you went back to RAIDZ you loaded a lot more data on the drive than you had when it was UFS or ZFS/RAIDZ2 ?

 

[Killjoy7]

I'm beginning to see your point... Hardware issue is more likely. The load was pretty much the same. I'm talking about 5GB of vids, about 15 in number. That's like 0% in 5.3TB of HDD space. Maybe I'm gonna try an older version of FreeNAS, and if that fails I'll put my project on hold for a while, to do some more research... Thnx a lot!

 

[Durkatlon]

Trying FreeNAS0.7.2 would be a good idea. This is just anecdotally of course, but in my specific case, I started out on FreeNAS8 with a Via EPIA SN10000G motherboard, and got the AHCI time-outs. I tried putting in new drives, changing to all the modes (IDE/RAID/AHCI) on the SATA Controller, but nothing led to a stable system.

The kicker is that I swapped out the motherboard in the problem system for an Asus E350 and using the same drives that used to time-out, got a rock-solid system. The other kicker is that I have two other systems with these Via EPIA boards in them, running FreeNAS 0.7.1 and they have been running great for well over a year already.

 

[cpizzato]

I'm having exactly the same problems that you had - suspect AHCI timeouts are the issue as well. Has degraded over time and streaming MP3s live hangs/is often problematic. What did you end up doing out of curiousity? I'm starting to think maybe changing to OpenSolaris with NAPP-IT might be the option due to the newer os version.

 

[Killjoy7]

I decided to put it on hold for a while to research some more, got overwhelmed by some other work and I've pretty much postponed it indefinitely... I was pretty much in favor of a linux distro solution, like Ubuntu. That was gonna be my next plan... When and if I resume this project I'm gonna give FreeNAS another chance though.

 

[Fornax]

Killjoy7,

Just a thought:
In your startingpost you say:
"FreeNAS has been set up using a 2.4Ghz Celeron D, 2GB of Ram, 4x2TB WD Green Sata2 drives and a usb 8GB stick on an asus m/b with a pci gigabit lan card."

To me this sounds like there will be a battle for access to the PCI-bus on your FreeNAS-hardware, which could very well be a cause for several timeouts. Although this would explain low/lower performance it puzzles me that it causes your Win7-PC (on the other side of the networkcable) to hang/crash, especially when explorer/WMP do hang but VLC happily plays things. Difficult to troubleshoot when things aren't broken but just don't work.
Prescott (Your Celeron-D) might be regarded slightly outdated nowadays but it is common hardware which you would expect to be supported. The FreeNAS image has limited space compared to a full distro, so perhaps some assumptions/shortcuts/defaults are made that do not work well with your specific motherboard.

Not a solution but it might help you find an explanation for why things won't work as expected.

 

[Killjoy7]

It is true that the hardware I used was a bit old especially the m/b and cpu... I believe it's possible that FreeNAS has some issues with the m/b's raid controller or whatnot but not with the cpu... I just tried to create a cheap server with any leftovers I had from previous PC configs. :)