FreeNAS systems as cold storage

[SSSSAT]

I’ve recently purchased 2 shitty PC’s with the aim to max their drives out and put Freenas on it.

Aim is to use all my leftover 500 GB HDD’s which I currently use as cold storage in a Freenas setup. The RAM will be around 8GB of DDR3 RAM probably.
That means they get used once every 3 months, maybe even 6 months, for a few days and then get turned off again.

• Is Freenas a good choice for this?

• Will the IP of Freenas stay the same after I’ve not used the setup for months?
• I plug in 6 HDD’s and USB stick with the OS. I’ve searched and if the USB stick dies it’s relatively easy to get the data from the pool back.
  How can I make sure that if 1 of the 6 HDD’s dies, I can still rebuild my pool? Which ZFS or whatever should I choose?

Thanks

 

[Heracles]

Hi SSSSat,

To survive the lost of a single drive, you need to use configure some redundancy in your vDev when creating your pool. Should you use Raid-Z1, the pool will survive the lost of a single drive. But be aware that more than 1 drive can die at once, even more over long periods of Hot - Cold cycles. Also, whenever a single drive fails, the pool will drop to zero protection. Should anything go wrong during the resilvering, the pool may end up corrupted. For that, you would be better protected by Raid-Z2.

Because FreeNAS will be down most of the time, there will be no scrubs performed. To scrub a pool allows to detect and fix whatever can be damaged by accidental causes. It is an important function to protect your pool's and data integrity. Also, whenever you will power up, a scrub will be started because none happened for too long. The result is that your cold drives will boot instantly to one of the most intensive task they can have.

Hard drives are better and last longer when they are hot and kept hot. This is true not only in FreeNAS, but for hard drives in general.

 

[SSSSAT]

https://tweakers.net/aanbod/2125282/asrock-fm2a88m-extreme4+-r20.html
https://tweakers.net/aanbod/2125396/amd-a10-7800-boxed.html

I’m looking for this mobo with this CPU & 16GB DDR3 RAM for this project.
Do you think this is a good decision? I’ve read some bad stuff about FM CPU’s or APU’s .

 

[Heracles]

Hi again SSSSat,

Here, I use only actual servers, assembled by manufacturers. As of now, all my servers are from Dell : T-110 (to be removed soon) ; T-130 ; T-330 and R-820.

I will let others share their experience with you on that subject.

Good luck,

 

[SSSSAT]

Anyone got some feedback on the FM CPU mobo ? Seems very cheap & has 8 SATA slots which is ideal for my case

 

[kdragon75]

FM?

 

[SSSSAT]

FM?

It's an AMD CPU standard .

 

[kdragon75]

Oh like socket FM2... Got it.

 

[tfran1990]

feedback on the FM CPU

there are cheap intel options out there as well, check out the hp prolient ml10

freenas doesnt report cpu usage and temp very well for AMD platforms.

 

[SSSSAT]

Does anyone have more expertise or experiences on FM motherboards?

for my project these mobo's really seem decent options, a lot of SATA ports & cheap