ext4 single drive share

[Zedicus]

is it possible to share a single drive as storage via the gui with out making a 1 drive vdev or using it in a ZFS config? i know this is not exactly the point of freenas but i am still hunting down some performance issues and this would be helpful. if not i can always go the BSD non-gui route but as a linux guy sometimes i draw a blank on the bsd command line.

thanks

 

[danb35]

Well, in the current version of FreeNAS you can still use UFS, though I understand support for UFS is going away in the next version. You can import ext2/3/4 volumes for temporary use, but I'm not sure if you can share them.

 

[cyberjock]

No. To put it short ZFS is built on vdevs and not disks. So by that logic if you create a single disk pool it is also a single disk vdev. It really changes nothing though because if you could build a single disk pool without a vdev you'd still have the same kind of protection from disk failure in both cases.. the disk fails and you lose your data.

I'm hard pressed to not say that you may not understand the fundamentals just based on the question you are asking. It's like asking if high-rise buildings could be taller if the sky was yellow instead of blue. What does the two have to do with anything? I don't know....

 

[Zedicus]

judging by the fact that my other thread got deleted i fear we are miscommunicating.

let me rephrase slightly, is there a way in the freenas gui to mount and share a single EXT4 device, one that would be outside of any ZFS.

I understand this is not generally a point of a freenas install so if i have to configure one with out the freenas interface i will do that. i am trying to check bandwidth on my disks direclty in a BSD distro to verify that connection is iether related to BSD or related to ZFS.

as far as my other post that was directly related to configuring freenas as a VM on KVM i would have assumed finding an answer for that would have been sticky worthy not deletion worthy. i still intend to pursue a freenas install for the time being.

 

[cyberjock]

To check bandwidth on individual disks you can use gstat.

# gstat

Updates every second with disk throughput numbers. ;)

 

[Zedicus]

in order for gstat to report disc utilization something needs to write to the disc
in order to write to the disc it needs mounted and a filesystem

if i were going to try and determine if my slowdown issue was related to my controller and disk, or something software related, maybe i would want to mount a single disk from the controller (perc h310 HBA, flashed to IT) give it a filesystem, (ext4) and write a large sequential chunk of data to it (CIFS mount or something, even from HD to other mounted HD)

can i build a share of a single EXT4 device in the freenas gui, or do i need to use CLI? (at this point i could have already had it done via CLI, now i am simply just curious)

 

[cyberjock]

You can use dd to either read from or write too. But you've totally lost me. SMART tests should tell you if your disks are bad. If it's not your disk that narrows down your search criteria significantly.

 

[SweetAndLow]

If you don't care about the contents of the disk you can write and read directly from it and skip all OS's and filesystem's by using dd. Your thought process is quite strange though and your question doesn't really make sense. If you are really wanting to test throughout of a disk you shouldn't be taking about shares either. This introduces the network and that will most certainly be the bottle neck. dd'ing directly to a disk isn't something people actually do that often.

 

[anodos]

is there a way in the freenas gui to mount and share a single EXT4 device

Short answer - no.
Long answer:
FreeBSD has mount_ext2fs which will allow you to mount an ext2 filesystem in read/write or an ext3 filesystem read-only. I don't believe it supports ext4.

Some basic googling indicates that there is an ext4fuse port for FreeBSD, but once again I believe you are limited to read-only.

Neither of the above fit in well with the intended purpose of FreeNAS. If you really want to experiment with Linux filesystems on FreeBSD you may want to consider installing vanilla FreeBSD.

 

[cyberjock]

Neither of the above fit in well with the intended purpose of FreeNAS. If you really want to experiment with Linux filesystems on FreeBSD you may want to consider installing vanilla FreeBSD.

Or just use Linux. ;)