FreeNAS use as VMWare 6 datastore at my house

[SCSIraidGURU]

All my stuff is in the basement. It is kept cool. I was considering placing this box in another part of the basement with a CAT 6 cable. I would start with a 500GB WD Black for FreeNAS and a pair of 2TB or 4TB WD Black drives. I don't need a lot of storage. My linux boxes are under 400 GB total. I just wanted RAID 1 redundancy or RAID 10 for performance for backup speeds to it. I do eSATA with WD Black drive and get 106 MBps backup speed. I also drop panflo fans into every fan slot. They are 30db and give great airflow.

 

[Chris Moore]

I do eSATA with WD Black drive and get 106 MBps backup speed.

The 106 MB/s is probably a speed limitation of the network if you are using 1Gb Ethernet.

I have an Intel dual core CPU that I could put 8 GB on.

Without knowing more about the hardware you are suggesting, I can't say anything about how well it might work. FreeNAS does not need the latest hardware but some older hardware has functional limitations that impact performance.

I have an old dual Xeon Supermicro board with E5430s and 16GB of ECC on it. It is a power hog with noisy fans at 230W.

This should provide more than enough performance but at a cost of heat and noise. I can't really say about the other hardware as not enough details are available.

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

I will post the specs tonight. I was an Intel dual core CPU on a Micro ATX board. I run Ubuntu on it now for my wife's dropbox account. I was going to move her dropbox server into VMWare on the DL360e. It handles Ubuntu with no issues. I think it has a 500GB drive in it now. So I was going to add two more for storage. I can upgrade it to 8GB of RAM.

 

[Chris Moore]

It handles Ubuntu with no issues.

I can run Ubuntu on a desktop that has a Pentium D (LGA 775) and came with a 250 GB IDE hard drive. That doesn't say anything about the hardware.

I can upgrade it to 8GB of RAM.

I can put 8GB in that Pentium D, but it will only use 4GB, even though it sees all 8GB. Last time I buy an HP.

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

This is an Intel micro atx board from Intel. Which HP, I believe you need to set a bios switch to go above 4GB. I can check for you.

 

[jgreco]

I can put 8GB in that Pentium D, but it will only use 4GB, even though it sees all 8GB. Last time I buy an HP.

Running what, FreeBSD/i386? You need to enable PAE. It'll use all 8GB, though not for a single process.

 

[jgreco]

Also if I read this right the OP wants to use an old box with 8GB of RAM for iSCSI...? Don't do that, the eventual pain will be bad.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...res-more-resources-for-the-same-result.28178/

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

Intel DG33TL board
Intel dual core E2160 1.8 Ghz CPU
8GB RAM
PCIe Dlink Gbps NIC

I did consider holding off and building something later on.

 

[Chris Moore]

Intel DG33TL board
Intel dual core E2160 1.8 Ghz CPU
8GB RAM
PCIe Dlink Gbps NIC

I did consider holding off and building something later on.

You are joking, right?

 

[rvassar]

You are joking, right?

Conroe is 64 bit... I actually had to go check, there were still 32 bit systems on the market in 2008. From an instruction set standpoint, it's not too different than the old LGA771 Xeon I was limping along on until recently. But the single thread benchmark is almost half, and there's only two cores. My guess is the kernel would run, but ZFS would fail to perform adequately.

 

[kdragon75]

The last couple that failed in my setup got so hot the metal encasing bulged.

Were they made by Samsung!?:D

 

[kdragon75]

ZFS is like LVM on hard core steroieds. Its is NOT to be used with ANY kind of RAID as it IS the RAID. Its one of the most sophisticated and advanced RAID solutions out there and performs checksums on every block, has advanced read caching and something that works like a cache for sync writes (async just uses RAM). This all requires a decent CPU. I have run this on everything from dual hexa core CPUs clocked at 2.9ghz all the way down to an Atom D525. A late Core2Duo will be fine for light usage writing backups but even that with iSCSI will be a bit much. The sweet spot for many is a late gen Pentium with ECC support. There low power, not painfully slow and meets the basic requirements.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Were they made by Samsung!?:D

Transcend.

Patrick