FreeNAS Success - ASUS C60M1-I mITX - Kingston 16GB 2X8GB DDR3 1600 RAM

[kurtism]

Hey Folks,

Just thought I would share my FreeNAS success story.

I had a DNS-323 with a 1TB seagate hard drive in it since around 2009 or so.... but I was running out of space on it... fortunatly I had another external 1TB USB LACIE drive laying around, so I transferred all the data from the DNS-323 onto this extra external hard drive I had.

I also happened to be using a Western Digital Black 1TB hard drive as my Windows 8 OS drive on my main desktop computer... thankfully I had 3 older smaller hard drives laying around and I was able to install my win8 on one of those hard drives for my main computer, and pull the 1TB drive from there too.

I then bought from ncix:
1 x ASUS C60M1-I AMD Fusion APU C-60 (1.0GHz, dual core) AMD Hudson M1 Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
1 x Kingston HyperX Blu Black Series 16GB 2X8GB DDR3 1600 RAM
1 x Kingston DTSE9H/16GBZ 16GB USB 2.0 DataTraveler SE9 USB stick
2 x Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS 7200.12 1TB SATA 32MB Cache 3.5in Internal Hard Drive
1 x Antec 430watt 80plus power supply
salvaged/had laying around
1 x 3 or 4 year old seagate 1TB drive
1 x 1 or 2 year old western digital black 1TB drive
1 x ATX antec computer case from like 2001

I downloaded FreeNAS 8.3.0-RELEASE-p1
installed it on the kingston USB stick
setup all the hardware in the case.
fired it up and configured freenas in a 4 disk RAIDZ which came out to be just under 3TB of storage capacity.

it was AWESOME!

I wired my whole house with CAT6 cable, and I connect it all together with a little 8 port dlink unmanaged green 1Gbit network switch

I couldn't believe the difference in transfer speed between FreeNAS and that crappy Dlink DNS-323
the best I could EVER get from the DNS-323 was 12-15MBytes per second read and 9-10MBytes per second write.
with the FreeNAS right off the bat I started transferring my data back to it at 45-60MBytes/Second using Windows CIFS!
then I tried the read speed back to my computer... immediatly I had 70-80MBytes/Second!

I was shocked I've never seen such network transfer speeds in my house before.

it is so awesome!

I also configured the plugins jail and setup Transmission and minidlna... both worked flawlessly!

Thanks FreeNAS folks

 

[gelno]

What you described is very similar to what I plan on doing...puts me at ease to see it work out well for you since I have yet set up a FreeNAS system myself

Thanks for the post!

 

[kurtism]

One problem I encountered is I can't use IE10 with the freeNAS web interface it just doesn't display properly... so I use firefox to administer it, no problem

the other oddity I noticed is every 30 minutes I get this message on the console:
Feb 1 16:07:58 freenas smartd[68724]: Device: /dev/ada3, 3 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
Feb 1 16:07:58 freenas smartd[68724]: Device: /dev/ada3, 3 Offline uncorrectable sectors
Feb 1 16:37:59 freenas smartd[68724]: Device: /dev/ada3, 3 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
Feb 1 16:37:59 freenas smartd[68724]: Device: /dev/ada3, 3 Offline uncorrectable sectors
Feb 1 17:07:58 freenas smartd[68724]: Device: /dev/ada3, 3 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
Feb 1 17:07:58 freenas smartd[68724]: Device: /dev/ada3, 3 Offline uncorrectable sectors
Feb 1 17:38:00 freenas smartd[68724]: Device: /dev/ada3, 3 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
Feb 1 17:38:00 freenas smartd[68724]: Device: /dev/ada3, 3 Offline uncorrectable sectors

other than that everything works perfectly.

these are the hard disks that show up in /var/run/dmesg.boot

Code:

ada0 at ahcich0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0                                     
ada0: <ST31000524AS JC4B> ATA-8 SATA 3.x device                                 
ada0: 600.000MB/s transfers (SATA 3.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)                    
ada0: Command Queueing enabled                                                  
ada0: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)                  
ada1 at ahcich1 bus 0 scbus1 target 0 lun 0                                     
ada1: <ST31000524AS JC4B> ATA-8 SATA 3.x device                                 
ada1: 600.000MB/s transfers (SATA 3.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)                    
ada1: Command Queueing enabled                                                  
ada1: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)                  
ada2 at ahcich2 bus 0 scbus2 target 0 lun 0                                     
ada2: <WDC WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0 05.01D05> ATA-8 SATA 3.x device                    
ada2: 600.000MB/s transfers (SATA 3.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)                    
ada2: Command Queueing enabled                                                  
ada2: 953868MB (1953523055 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)                  
ada3 at ahcich3 bus 0 scbus3 target 0 lun 0                                     
ada3: <ST31000340AS SD1A> ATA-8 SATA 1.x device                                 
ada3: 150.000MB/s transfers (SATA 1.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)                    
ada3: Command Queueing enabled                                                  
ada3: 953869MB (1953525168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)                  

 

[Stephens]

the other oddity I noticed is every 30 minutes I get this message on the console:
Feb 1 16:07:58 freenas smartd[68724]: Device: /dev/ada3, 3 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
:
other than that everything works perfectly.

Except for the fact that your data is at risk, everything is fine? ;)
Pending Sectors

 

[kurtism]

ah I see... well 3 sectors doesn't seem so bad, there are quite a few sectors on the drive available... I wonder why the freenas web interface shows "status OK" with a green symbol if there are smartd errors? I guess that status indicates the health of the array only?

 

[cyberjock]

ah I see... well 3 sectors doesn't seem so bad, there are quite a few sectors on the drive available... I wonder why the freenas web interface shows "status OK" with a green symbol if there are smartd errors? I guess that status indicates the health of the array only?

Precisely. But 3 bad sectors pretty much is a given that there will be alot more very soon. It's a fairly well known fact that sectors fail and the "error" seems to spread across the platters over time. Not always, but often enough that that single indicator is a VERY good indicator of drive health.

 

[kurtism]

bummer, well I'll keep an eye on it for sure, I hate spending money, but it is an OLD drive, maybe I'll grab a 3tb drive to replace it, and then slowly replace them all with 3tb drives as the other ones die.... this could take years

 

[cyberjock]

Just some FYI. Your current pending sector count tells you that part of your data would be corrupt without redundnacy. If you have RAIDZ1 and a different disk fails you can pretty much expect file corruption. So "waiting" isn't exactly the best idea either. I would definitely do a scrub of your zpool. But, here's the catch. Doing a scrub could cause the drive to fail completely anyway. But if you have a different drive fail and you have to do a resilver and you have a RAIDZ1 you could lose the zpool.

Basically, consider that disk "failed" for most practical purposes.

 

[kurtism]

SOOOO... sure enough the pending sector count slowly continued to climb, pretty much every week it would go up one number, so when it hit 8 pending sectors I ordered a new 1TB seagate drive from newegg and went through the hard drive replacement procedure at http://www.freenas.org/images/resources/freenas8.3.1/freenas8.3.1_guide.html and it worked perfectly... it took about 4hours and 30minutes to resilver and it was awesome! I've also upgraded to freenas8.3.1.

now I get no more errors at the consol!