ext4 what to do

[mael]

I have only one desktop and all my internal hard drives consist of:
2 x 3TB ext4
2 x 3TB unformatted
Other HDDs/SSD one for FreeNAS and the rest for whatever is needed.
All my data is on the ext4 drives. I was thinking of transferring all my data to ext2 drives and then to UFS/ZFS.
I've heard there was an issue with inodes. And even if you tried to fix them that there would still be issues.
I've heard Linux can write to ZFS/UFS not sure if that's true but that it wasn't safe but that was some eight years ago. One would hope progress has been made.
I can't exactly use FAT32 I have quite a few files bigger than 4GB.
I was thinking of a NTFS filesystem but I'm wondering if there are any issues with that. And if it's made on Linux will that be a bigger issue ?

Oh I don't know if this is also dated info but someone wrote that all those filesystems can ONLY write to UFS ? That can't be accurate can it ? I keep reading on FreeNAS that I should use ZFS over UFS I can right ?

Search wasn't working for me and the n00b guides were down so I don't know if these things were covered there.

If I missed something (again...) please let me know. I'll try to fill you in as soon as I can. Thanks for reading and thanks for replying those that can decipher my horrible writing style.

 

[jgreco]

Simple solution?

Build a NAS. Connect it to the network. Connect your Linux box with whatever filesystem it has to the network. Configure NFS. Copy files to NAS. Be happy. :D

 

[mael]

Oh crud now I've done it. I rewrote my post so many times. I kept trying to simplify it because every time I make a post I confuse the hell out of everyone. Now I over simplified it.
All my drives are internal and I only have one desktop.
2 x 3TB ext4
2 x 3TB unformatted
Other HDDs/SSD for whatever need.

Either I write too much or too little. My bad. I swear this comes from past experience where a guy said I posted way too much and all that I should be writing is my question oh boy.

Edit: Seeing as you mentioned it. What speeds should I be getting when transferring from one computer to another ? I don't know if it was a Virtualbox limit or ext4 to UFS or what but I was uploading a file to the server (when I was testing it it's not running on a vm anymore) I was only getting 1MB/s. I have over 3TB of data..that is a really long time to transfer something...

 

[jgreco]

Around here, you have to give some specific information. The E5-based X9DRE-TF+ with 128GB of RAM, dual 10GbE, and a dozen 4TB HDD's I have on the bench is capable of much more than the Intel Atom D525 with 8GB of RAM and dual 1GbE sitting next to it, and both are faster than other things people have used.

You've pretty much failed at getting me to visualize what you've got and what you're trying to accomplish, and I don't know where things like Virtualbox are fitting into this picture. If you are trying to run FreeNAS on Virtualbox, I can tell you that's a bad idea. If you want to run ZFS, you should have a separate system with at least 8GB of RAM. For decent speeds under ZFS with CIFS, you want to make sure you've got a good gigabit Ethernet card (like Intel, not like Realtek) and a CPU with at least two cores, and the clock speed will be directly related to how fast it can go.

 

[mael]

Lol, all forums are different. Wish I'd gone with my original post. If it weren't for that damn forum I'd've had ALL this info presented and ready. Oh geez...
Uh..what do I remember...i5 750...16GB RAM (1333MHz I think), some Asus motherboard P7H55 or so, those drives I mentioned 7200 RPMs except for a 1.5TB Green drive and an SSD, Gigabit ethernet but my router is ancient 10/100 Linksys
Hopefully that describes what I have and what I want is wishful thinking ? In case my hardware is crummy. Transfer speeds as fast as I can SFTP from my desktop to my laptop. Which I would think wouldn't be too difficult. But now I'm thinking your hardware sounds better lol.
I...did I forget to put that I was just testing it out on virtualbox to see if it would work ? I read the stuff about vms being a bad idea for FreeNAS so just a test.
No, I have a terrible Ethernet card on board Realtek but I figured 100 wouldn't be too bad of a speed to go for and my CPU is a quad-core 2.66GHz...I'm guessing that's quite slow ?
Wow, this server stuff is going over my head lol. I do belong in the N00b section.

Oh right and the reason I brought up Virtualbox was because I was wondering if that would impact the performance and when I finally get my system up and running it'll run decently. Or if the vm was a very close representation of what I could expect. Because I didn't think the hardware would have too heavy of a impact on performance much like my other VMs that I could transfer files to and from at "max" 100 speeds which is what 8 or so megs ?

 

[jgreco]

Okay, I'm going to go fishing in there and pull out some things that I think will be helpful.

1) Running FreeNAS as a VM for the purposes of learning is perfectly fine. We strongly recommend against putting any data on it that you can't afford to lose. Performance will be very bad on something like Virtualbox, because there are so many layers involved.

2) Having a gigabit ethernet controller connected to a 10/100 router means you have a 100 megabit network. The absolute best with-a-tailwind speed you could see is about 12.5 megabytes per second. You won't get anywhere near that with Virtualbox in the mix though.

3) FreeNAS will happily install to a USB thumb drive. You can disconnect everything from the Asus machine, plug in a thumb drive and the two blank drives and gain a reasonable FreeNAS platform to experiment with. When done, you can remove the thumb drive, reconnect everything the way it had been, and get your Asus machine back the way it was. This is probably the better way to experiment.

4) There are all kinds of cheap 5-port gigabit switches out there these days. They're as cheap as $15.

 

[cyberjock]

I have http://www.monoprice.com/products/p...=10521&cs_id=1052104&p_id=7857&seq=1&format=2 in my basement and I get great speeds with it. 8 ports typically will be good for your entire home.

And your hardware list looks fine. You should be able to get very good speeds with it(minus your crappy 100Mb network hardware).

 

[mael]

I have a feeling I'm confusing everyone. That sounds just like me. x'D
jgreco:
1.) Yes, I saw the thread...oh that was made by you. x'D I saw it. Honestly just for testing I have no real prior knowledge with FreeBSD/NAS/Servers so no intentions of going for something radical.
2.) Yeah, that's all I'm going for now. Ah, thank you very much now I know it was just virtualbox. And still wouldn't be nice if I had two computers to transfer all my data to and from at 12.5 ~9 megs.
3.) Sadly, I don't have an 8+ GB stick. I read that you needed 4GB at least but I guess 4 billion or so bytes from a 4GB stick isn't enough. But I currently have it installed on a 500GB HDD I had still using the SSD for Linux until I can get FreeNAS set up (maybe..I feel bad using 128GB for it I don't think it'll ever need all that)

jgreco & cyberjock: I've actually been looking for a router seeing as I'm not the only one in the house and Wi-fi is needed. Especially for torrenting. It's so sad I can only download one torrent at a time or the router just dies. Runs out of memory I guess. Only problem is most routers nowadays have supposed amazing speeds of like 1750 Mbps wireless and 10/100 Ethernet ports. :\ I know everyone will say move onto Wi-Fi but I'm feeling old school I've had bad experience with Wi-Fi on a desktop.

I swear I'm veering very far but those switches how exactly do they handle say something like torrenting ? I've heard people say the reason for my issues there are because the router doesn't have enough RAM (2MB) and as soon as a new one was bought it was all working fine. I swear I've bought every humblebundle game and the reason I haven't downloaded them is because I'm too impatient to download one at a time and then my net dies. xD
The switches sort of just send the data to the computers and they act as what the router does so it's the computer's hardware that gets pushed not the switch ? Or would those just cause me headaches and a 10 meg E / 1 billion gig wifi router my only hope ?

And I guess my only hope for transferring my data to FreeNAS is to find a Windows machine partition to NTFS. Screw it I'll risk it and try via the tools provided on Linux and let everyone know if it works or not.

Thanks for all the replies I really appreciate all the information you guys have provided it means a lot.

 

[jgreco]

The device you (and every other consumer) calls a "router" is no such thing, it's a NAT gateway that does NAT translation between the single IPv4 address your ISP probably hands you, and the network of devices you want to operate. Your NAT gateway needs to run things like a DHCP server, stateful forwarding, and other things to work. It is relatively demanding on the software. Many NAT gateways have crappy CPU's and limited memory, and were basically designed to connect a 10Mbps PC or three to a 768/384 DSL line. Depending on the design, even the data moving through its supposed "100Mbps" ports may be traversing the CPU, which means extra craptacular(TM) performance. Often the firmware on these things is written by the lowest bidder contractor, who is given the boot the moment the product ships, and so bugs never get addressed. The manufacturer is happy to have your money.

So... for NAT gateways, for *best* luck, find something that can successfully run DD-WRT or OpenWRT or one of the other open source firmwares. I'd been handing out some WRT54GL's to family, friends, etc., loaded up with OpenWRT for years, relatively easy to maintain and an arseload of potential features.

A proper modern gigabit Ethernet switch should be able to provide full speed forwarding on all ports. GigE has been out since 1999. They've had 14 years to work on chipsets, and really, even the cheap stuff works pretty well. And even the stuff that doesn't work well ... will work at speeds far greater than 100Mbps. A switch won't have any idea what sort of traffic you're pushing, it'll just push it around. As long as you don't need fancy features, I feel reasonably confident in saying that you ought to spend a few bucks on a cheap one.

As for wireless, we're on the cusp of 802.11ac. There's a lot of new products soon to be launched. ASUS continues to offer some of the nicer "Gigabit router" products, and it is actually quite likely that a good quality product in this arena might cover all of your needs, since these devices tend to be all-in-one wifi, NAT, and mini-ethernet-switch.

 

[mael]

Yeah I read once about this "router" stuff but I don't think it went into as much detail as you did but twenty times longer. Thanks for all that I'm not all that great with computers but when it comes to networks I'm completely horrible.

So, you think I should get both a switch and a well..I guess we'll call it "router" ?
I've definitely been wanting to try openwrt. It's just as far as I can tell from the site different revision numbers have different ways of installing firmware and different firmware is needed for each revision. I don't want to buy something to find out it's v2 and when I try to load firmware for v1 I get a brick which I understand is still possible but if I'm the only one with v2 I'm royally screwed..
But yeah I don't think I need 802.11ac the fastest transfers we can do on any of our devices (Wi-Fi) is 300 megs. And we won't be upgrading our laptops for years probably by the time 802.11ad (that's after ac if not mistaken..) is out the door. And no way I'll need 1900 megs for a phone. I was actually thinking of getting either:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buffalo-Air...TF8&qid=1372626008&sr=8-2&keywords=WZR-600DHP
Which seems to have really good documentation and stable(ish ?) firmware versions.
or
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buffalo-Air...TF8&qid=1372626947&sr=8-1&keywords=WZR-600DHP
but no clue if there are revisions and it's listed firmware is "trunk" which I suppose would be unstable ? But then again I've run DD-WRT and used an "unstable" version and it worked perfectly fine.

All, I want to do is (wired) have FreeNAS stream video to a Pi, download files via torrent to the NAS and transfer the more than occasional .iso file to and from the server.
And everyone (wireless) just access to pictures and documents and I suppose video game installation files. Hmm..those last ones will occasionally be around 15GB in size. I don't play them I just buy them so that's not too big of a deal for me if it's slow as molasses.
But do you think those routers will server my purpose ?

 

[jgreco]

You're probably best off finding a "wireless router" with several built-in switch ports. A good one usually runs $75-$200. SmallNetBuilder has a comprehensive review section. You might want to look at some of "last year's" reviews to see if you can find a well-thought-of product that is now older, these will typically be discounted by retailers to get them out of inventory.