FreeNAS Mini

[xcom]

So we decided to buy a freenas mini of amazon from iXsystems. We are building a small lab here at work.

I am a bit disappointed how they handle their online sales. They HQ does not take calls on "online" sales and all we keep hearing is you will get an update soon. Our emails have gone unanswered. We are about 2 1/2 weeks sense our order...

Has anybody had had this type of experience with iXsystems?

 

[xcom]

I just wanted to update that I got a PM from the core team and communication seems to start flowing.
Thank you!

 

[jgreco]

We would all be very much interested in knowing hardware details when you get the unit. We suspect that it is based on the ASRock Avoton C2750 board, but some confirmation and any other commentary you'd have regarding the unit would be interesting.

 

[xcom]

jgreco,

I definitely will. Base on some research here and some comparison I have done this seems to be right on the money. If it was personally up to me I would have done it another way. Due to been work related we need the support behind it :)

Thanks for your reply!

Regards.

 

[xcom]

Just wanted to post a quick update.

iXsystems has contacted me and we have exchange several emails.

I am most impress with their response and assure me I will be receiving a tracking number within 48HRs.

Great group of guys!

 

[xcom]

FreeNAS Mini is now on it's way.

:D

 

[Oded]

And? :) We're still waiting for your input on performance, what CPU/motherboard is inside, etc.

Thanks in advance.

 

[xcom]

Oded,

Well I keep forgetting to take pics of the guts. But it is an Asrock Board with Intel Avoton Octa-Core Processor
and the performance is amazing!

Here are the results of an iperf test with default settings:

dark@oscuridad:~$ iperf -c XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 96.1 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 3] local 10.30.2.51 port 42227 connected with XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.15 GBytes 991 Mbits/sec
dark@oscuridad:~$
Here is a dd over nfs:
dark@oscuridad:~$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=nfs_dump01/sample.img bs=1G count=10
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 88.3092 s, 122 MB/s
real 1m28.353s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m4.640s
dark@oscuridad:~$
I get an average of 133Mbps transfer speed over nfs when copying iso files.
scp transfer are about 70Mbps...
I also have VirtualBox running on a jail with the VM on almost all the time.The VM has 4GB of memory and 4 Cores assign to it. Than I have plex running doing transcoding for all of my chromecast devices... No issues, no lags, and no chokes.

I will post pics soon.

 

[Oded]

Wow that is great. I really think ill build my next setup on this. I would have taken the mini but I want more than 4 drives.

Can anyone suggest a case that can take this mobo and 8 hit swap drives? If none exists, I'll settle for 6.

 

[jkh]

Wow that is great. I really think ill build my next setup on this. I would have taken the mini but I want more than 4 drives.

Can anyone suggest a case that can take this mobo and 8 hit swap drives? If none exists, I'll settle for 6.

Let us know too if you find one! Believe me, we looked. It's actually surprisingly hard to find a case with >4 drives that also:

• Features genuine hot-swappable drive bays where a drive can be pulled under power without killing the drive or the box (or even the drive's buddy!) in testing.
• Is solid and built well (there are a lot of flimsy, plastic cases out there with poor airflow, fragile drive rails, insufficient room for proper cabling, or all of the above).
• Doesn't cost WAY too much money (there are some truly nice all-aluminum, boutique cases out there, but they're just not cost-effective - nobody wants to pay $500 just for a case!).

We'd love to have a 6 drive or 8 drive Mini offering. We've probably looked at 15 different cases so far. Still looking. :( It's not worth doing if we can't do it right.

 

[jgreco]

Curious to know if you looked at the UNAS offerings...?

 

[jkh]

Curious to know if you looked at the UNAS offerings...?

Yep, both NS-600 Pro and NS-800 Pro. I don't have the full set of selection criteria we applied to them handy (still sitting in the ocean south of India on vacation), so all I can say is that we looked at them and are still looking!

 

[Oded]

Let us know too if you find one! Believe me, we looked. It's actually surprisingly hard to find a case with >4 drives that also:

• Features genuine hot-swappable drive bays where a drive can be pulled under power without killing the drive or the box (or even the drive's buddy!) in testing.
• Is solid and built well (there are a lot of flimsy, plastic cases out there with poor airflow, fragile drive rails, insufficient room for proper cabling, or all of the above).
• Doesn't cost WAY too much money (there are some truly nice all-aluminum, boutique cases out there, but they're just not cost-effective - nobody wants to pay $500 just for a case!).

We'd love to have a 6 drive or 8 drive Mini offering. We've probably looked at 15 different cases so far. Still looking. :( It's not worth doing if we can't do it right.

Looks like the silverstone ds380 is the case we were looking for.

 

[jgreco]

Yep, both NS-600 Pro and NS-800 Pro. I don't have the full set of selection criteria we applied to them handy (still sitting in the ocean south of India on vacation), so all I can say is that we looked at them and are still looking!

Stop shooting down planes and make yourself useful.

But seriously, it'd be interesting to see that info. As you know, this business is all about the details, but actually finding out those details can be tricky. For gear I expect to have a business case for, it isn't hard to justify an eval or speculative purchase... we've got one of those ASRock Avoton 1U's in the shop right now which has totally awesome archival possibilities. But for the non-business use cases, It is hard to justify buying half a dozen chassis in order to evaluate them just to be able to find the best unit to sell a few to friends, which is usually at cost.