FreeNas recommended ITX motherboard + raid question

[mazdajai]

I bought a zotac amd ITX motherboard that comes with onboard RAID (I believe is Geforce 6400 media shield). I created a Raid 5 but FreeNas still the disks as individual disks, i thought the raid is established on bios.

How come freenas is seeing disks when general OS sees the raid?

What is the general recommendatiom on using Raid? (onboard Raid vs FreeNas Raid vs hardware Raid)

thanks!

 

[ProtoSD]

Probably because you need a driver for the raid to work in FreeNAS. ZFS is software Raid, which has the advantage that if your controller dies and you can't get an exact match on a replacement controller, you won't be able to read your data. Some people still use their raid controllers with ZFS, but there's always the risk of the controller dying and not being able to get to your data. With software raid, like ZFS in FreeNAS, the drives can be switched to new hardware and your data is still accessible (if the new hardware is compatible with FreeNAS of course).

 

[matthewowen01]

What is the general recommendatiom on using Raid? (onboard Raid vs FreeNas Raid vs hardware Raid)
thanks!

Don't use onbaord raid, don't use hardware raid.

use zfs.

 

[joeschmuck]

Strongly recommend you disable your onboard RAID if you plan on using FreeNAS for the reasons protosd mentioned above. Beyond that, if you have 4GB or more of RAM, use ZFS filing system and 64-bit FreeNAS.

 

[mazdajai]

Zfs for RAID - Do i need a powerful processor for parity calculation?

The motherboard I am putting in is Zotac Gefore 6100 ITX, it has 4 SATA ports and Giga Ethernet. Should I go for dual giga? I want to get this right because once I build and put this in production I would not want to touch it again.

 

[ProtoSD]

No, many of us are just using dual core Atom processors with no problems. What do you plan to use it for? You can do dual Gig if you want, but you still great great performance if you don't, it depends on what you plan to do. You should have a minimum of 4GB of RAM, but if you don't want to mess with it later, start with 8GB or more.

 

[mazdajai]

Thanks for comment - I plan to use it for smb (file and backup) and nfs (iso for vmware).

I am using 2GB, I will upgrade to 4GB.

 

[joeschmuck]

Someone here reported having difficulties with a Zotac I believe, couldn't get the LAN driver to work. Not sure which model it was. I will update this post when I find it so you can read.

Update: Nevermind, it was a Sapphire AMD Pure Fusion E350 Mini ITX, SODIMM, SATA3, USB3, Marvell Gigabit mother board.

 

[mazdajai]

Thanks. I am going to replace it with Jetway NC81. Zotac is a relatively new company and the support community is very small.

CF-IDE is often suggested to implement FreeNAS, is there a particular reason? Since SD and MMC is more common....

 

[Milhouse]

CF-IDE is often suggested to implement FreeNAS, is there a particular reason? Since SD and MMC is more common....

I'd only suggest using a CF-IDE adapter if you couldn't boot from your USB ports. Plain old USB memory sticks are increasingly used these days, and are cheap and reliable (I'd avoid no-name sticks to be on the safe side).

I'm booting FreeNAS 8.0.1-BETA3 from a 2GB Verbatim USB stick with no problems on an HP N36L (AMD Neo 1.3GHz dual-core, 4GB RAM, ZFS RAIDZ1).

 

[joeschmuck]

CF-IDE is prevellant on FreeNAS .7, not so much with version 8. Version 8 works very well from a USB flash drive. They are cheaper than the CF. CF cards last approx 2 years from what I've been reading before they start having write issues, USB flash on the other hand well it will hopefully last longer.

I recommend a 4GB flash drive only because the minimum spec changed from 1GB to 2GB recently and if you have 4GB you give yourself some expansion room down the road. Either way you need a 2GB minimum.

The other benefit of CF is it boots faster but my USB Flash drive only takes about 45 seconds to boot the system. Cheaper drives will take a little longer, more expensive will be a bit quicker. Since you shouldn't boot the NAS all the time, speed is not that important. I would not buy a USB3 flash drive. I tried one and it didn't work. I tried the SuperTalent Express RAM Cache which is fast on a USB 3.0 port but it didn't like FreeNAS as all. It's a bit pricy for a boot drive, I just tried it to see how fast it could boot.

And I don't want to steer you clear of a CF card, you can use it but I don't think it's a good use of your money. Buy one more hard drive or two USB Flash drives and configure both of them and keep one as a backup.

Just my opinion.

 

[Milhouse]

CF-IDE is prevellant on FreeNAS .7,

I must admit I've always booted FreeNAS 7 from USB, though maybe it was also a timing issue as older hardware (which people would often re-purpose for NAS duties) couldn't always boot from USB in which case CF-IDE adapters made sense. Perhaps now with FN8 most people have moved on to using USB-bootable kit?

 

[joeschmuck]

I must admit I've always booted FreeNAS 7 from USB, though maybe it was also a timing issue as older hardware (which people would often re-purpose for NAS duties) couldn't always boot from USB in which case CF-IDE adapters made sense. Perhaps now with FN8 most people have moved on to using USB-bootable kit?

I think you're spot on with the comment on older hardware. Most MB's could not boot from USB or most USB flash drives were unable to boot. A CF card on the IDE interface got past that limitation. Now it seems like most of the FreeNAS 8.x machines seem to be not very old.