FreeNAS - should I?

[muchgooder]

I am a software developer / geek that is looking for a bit of advice on which direction I should go in. I currently have 3 zyxel storage units (2 drives each) and a sff pc that serves as my windows server (it serves various utilities - weather station software, sql for kodi, sabnzbd services, etc). It's by no means a high-usage environment. The vast majority of the drives are being used as shares - pictures, home movies, tv shows, movies.

I stumbled across an 8 bay supermicro NAS with 64 gig of ram so I thought I would use that to eliminate the the need for the 3 devices and a pc. I've been reading up on FreeNAS as it involves a lot of areas in which I am a novice. After doing a lot of reading I had a bit of a revelation: is this right for me?

My needs:

- Lots of storage space.
- Speed (at least fast enough to stream 4k movies, which isn't a problem in my current little setup)
- The ability to create VMs. I would especially like the ability to create a windows vm and have it reside on an ssd in the NAS (all other drives are SATA)

What I don't really have a need for is redundancy. Anything that is important (pictures and home movies) are backed up to blu ray.

Sooooooooo - is FreeNAS right for me? Maybe use it without RAID?

 

[Meyers]

The 8-bay sounds like it would work fine. I recommend using ECC memory with FreeNAS (but only if you care about your data). I'd also recommend doing a good long burn-in process using a memory testing app (like memtest86).

Then you could use drives like these (enterprise drives or WD Reds at the very least). Do a burn-in procedure on them as well. Search the forums for this (I think it's a sticky post).

Some Supermicro boards have SATA DOM slots. If yours doesn't, you MIGHT be able to get away with a single small SSD for the OS.

If the board has PCI-E slots you could also throw in a PCI-E m.2 adapter and use an m.2 drive, freeing up a bay for another data drive. There are two slot adapters as well. You could mirror two of them for the OS (recommended) or use one OS and one VM if you don't care about redundancy there. Or even better, get two adapters if you have the slots available and use two for OS and two for VM (mirrors).

I'd always recommend mirroring your data drives at the very least. When you lose a drive (and it IS when) do you really want to be spending hours restoring files from Blu-ray?

If you go with four data drives, I would use mirrors (basically a RAID 1+0 setup). If you do 6-8 then RAID-Z2 should work. Use this handy RAID calculator to figure out how much space you'll get with each config. Either way, you should be able to handle 4K streaming (unless you have tons of clients).

By the way, you kind of have to size this stuff out ahead of time. It's not easy to change it later.

If you don't mirror your OS, make sure you back up your FreeNAS config (it's in the GUI) so when the OS drive fails you can reinstall the OS and restore your config. But ask yourself if you really want to be down while you wait for a replacement drive.

As far as the virtualization stuff goes, I don't have a ton of experience with the new bhyve implementation. Google "bhyve windows" and see what kind of experiences people are having with it. My sense of it is that it works but it's probably not as good as a dedicated virtual solution like VMware.

 

[muchgooder]

The 8-bay sounds like it would work fine. I recommend using ECC memory with FreeNAS (but only if you care about your data). I'd also recommend doing a good long burn-in process using a memory testing app (like memtest86).

Then you could use drives like these (enterprise drives or WD Reds at the very least). Do a burn-in procedure on them as well. Search the forums for this (I think it's a sticky post).

Some Supermicro boards have SATA DOM slots. If yours doesn't, you MIGHT be able to get away with a single small SSD for the OS.

If the board has PCI-E slots you could also throw in a PCI-E m.2 adapter and use an m.2 drive, freeing up a bay for another data drive. There are two slot adapters as well. You could mirror two of them for the OS (recommended) or use one OS and one VM if you don't care about redundancy there. Or even better, get two adapters if you have the slots available and use two for OS and two for VM (mirrors).

I'd always recommend mirroring your data drives at the very least. When you lose a drive (and it IS when) do you really want to be spending hours restoring files from Blu-ray?

If you go with four data drives, I would use mirrors (basically a RAID 1+0 setup). If you do 6-8 then RAID-Z2 should work. Use this handy RAID calculator to figure out how much space you'll get with each config. Either way, you should be able to handle 4K streaming (unless you have tons of clients).

By the way, you kind of have to size this stuff out ahead of time. It's not easy to change it later.

If you don't mirror your OS, make sure you back up your FreeNAS config (it's in the GUI) so when the OS drive fails you can reinstall the OS and restore your config. But ask yourself if you really want to be down while you wait for a replacement drive.

As far as the virtualization stuff goes, I don't have a ton of experience with the new bhyve implementation. Google "bhyve windows" and see what kind of experiences people are having with it. My sense of it is that it works but it's probably not as good as a dedicated virtual solution like VMware.

Thanks so much for your very detailed response. I think I am all good with the hardware - the server does in fact have ECC memory and I have plenty of drives.

I think your response touched on why I don't want to go down any of those paths. The vast, vast majority of my files are movies and tv shows and nothing I couldn't get again (or more likely just choose not to). I back up pictures and home movies like they are doing out of style - they fit on blu ray no problem.

Is there any reason that I couldn't skip all of the RAIDs and mirrors and simply kind of use it like I am now? In other words, just create individual volumes on the individual drives and create shares, vm's etc without all of the complication?

 

[sretalla]

Is there any reason that I couldn't skip all of the RAIDs and mirrors and simply kind of use it like I am now? In other words, just create individual volumes on the individual drives and create shares, vm's etc without all of the complication?

If you're serious about not needing redundancy, why not create a pool with a single striped pool of all your disks (assuming they are equal size), giving you a performance boost (although admittedly costing you a small electrical penalty for doing all reads across the pool rather than single disks only)?

You could then create the datasets within that pool to parallel what you do now with volumes.

 

[Meyers]

Is there any reason that I couldn't skip all of the RAIDs

Sure, if you don't care about losing it all and having to restore.

Have you checked out Synology? That might be a simpler solution.

 

[muchgooder]

If you're serious about not needing redundancy, why not create a pool with a single striped pool of all your disks (assuming they are equal size), giving you a performance boost (although admittedly costing you a small electrical penalty for doing all reads across the pool rather than single disks only)?

You could then create the datasets within that pool to parallel what you do now with volumes.

All different drives unfortunately

 

[garm]

A major feature of ZFS is the ability to heal data on the fly, this requires some level of parity to work. I would say that a “I don’t care about the data” scenario would be RAIDz1 as it’s able to ensure data integrity under load, but you risk the pool if one drive fails. This would not be a big issue if restoring from backup is low cost. Having your backup on bluray is not what I would call safe storage however..

 

[muchgooder]

A major feature of ZFS is the ability to heal data on the fly, this requires some level of parity to work. I would say that a “I don’t care about the data” scenario would be RAIDz1 as it’s able to ensure data integrity under load, but you risk the pool if one drive fails. This would not be a big issue if restoring from backup is low cost. Having your backup on bluray is not what I would call safe storage however..

I don't disagree with any of that. If this were for a business I would absolutely go in this direction. I have a system for redundancy for pictures and movies.

 

[muchgooder]

Sure, if you don't care about losing it all and having to restore.

Have you checked out Synology? That might be a simpler solution.

Thanks so much for this. It has been years since I have looked at it - it seems to be better suited to what I am looking for. Any reason not to?

 

[danb35]

All different drives unfortunately

Why do you think this is relevant?

 

[seanm]

Thanks so much for this. It has been years since I have looked at it - it seems to be better suited to what I am looking for. Any reason not to?

My use case is different from yours, but I also considered Synology and decided upon FreeNAS. Pros: It's free and open source, good forum & community, iX is responsive to bug reports and patches, ZFS is sweet.

 

[Chris Moore]

is FreeNAS right for me? Maybe use it without RAID?

no

 

[garm]

I would say that FreeNAS should be your document/pictures storage and your need for a media scratch disk could be anything else. It could also be FreeNAS, if parity for media is an unacceptable cost you can of course have it on single drive pools (or a pool of striped drives) if you want to get more out of the CPU in your NAS (I run everything on my FreeNAS on mirrored vdevs as I have three sets of disk sizes/types).

I run databases, jails and VMs on a pair of SSDs (backed up to my main pool) and a main pool consisting of two mirror vdevs à 1 TB and 4 TB (the 1 TB are from an earlier server and the new server had the 4 TB disks added, plans are to change the 1 TB drives to 8 some time in the future when my pool approaches 70% utilization). My main storage pool is the one I backup off site, now I don’t comply to 3-2-1 as I don’t have a second copy locally, but I sleep better at night with the deception that “copies=2” on important stuff somehow is a second copy any way (it isn’t ;)

 

[Chris Moore]

Then you could use drives like these (enterprise drives

Better value:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Seagate-Constellation-ES-3-SAS-Drive-4TB-4000NM0023-100-Health/273729260116
If you can deal with SAS drives. I would prefer SATA.

 

[muchgooder]

Why do you think this is relevant?

I don't - I was answering the question. I am a novice at this and I falsely assumed that it was necessary based on how the question was phrased.

 

[danb35]

I am a novice at this and I falsely assumed that it was necessary based on how the question was phrased.

Indeed. No, it's not necessary that all the disks be of the same size when they're striped.

single striped pool of all your disks (assuming they are equal size),

Why limit this suggestion to the case where the disks are all the same size?

 

[muchgooder]

no

To which question? Both? I am just trying to find the right option for me without making things too difficult.

 

[muchgooder]

I think my fear in all of this is setting up the drives incorrectly and that's why I am starting to lean toward synology or open media vault. It seems with those (and probably with freenas if I can wade through all of the options) I can have a simple setup and still get the features I need.

EDIT: I may just give this a go and set up each drive as its own volume

 

[Chris Moore]

I may just give this a go and set up each drive as its own volume

ZFS can't do error correction without redundancy. If you are not going to have any redundancy, you may as well just use Linux or some other system.
Please don't use FreeNAS at all if you are not going to use the redundancy that would protect your data not only from data corruption (bit rot) but also from disk failure.

 

[muchgooder]

ZFS can't do error correction without redundancy. If you are not going to have any redundancy, you may as well just use Linux or some other system.
Please don't use FreeNAS at all if you are not going to use the redundancy that would protect your data not only from data corruption (bit rot) but also from disk failure.

Thank you again for your replies. What's the harm in doing this? I could still utilize all of the features of freenas (including snapshots)? If not freenas can you suggest another?