Have 16GB and 60GB SSDs... which one for Boot? Suggested use for the other?

[r0b0ty]

Hello all.

I am very close to completing my first FreeNAS build (just waiting on a CPU heatsink bracket in the mail). While I wait, I wanted to get your opinion on the use of two SSDs that I have at my disposal. I initially bought a 16GB, based on the recommended FreeNAS minimum requirements, but then bought another 60 GB SSD.

Which would you suggest that I use as the Boot drive? I am not ready to explore ZIL and LARC, as I'm quite the noob, but what would you recommend that I do with the second SSD? Use as a the Jail drive (is that even an option)?

Anyway, your suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[kdragon75]

You could certainly use the 60GB for the jails. It would be added as its own one disk pool in the volume manager. I cant say much more without knowing your intended uses and full hardware setup.

 

[r0b0ty]

@kdragon75 My plan is to have a simple Mirror VDev (two 4 TB WD Red NAS drives) - and use a third 4 TB WD Red as my backup drive. I'll be running an older Intel Xeon E3-1240 (3.3 GHz) CPU with 16 GB DDR3 ECC RAM on (again) an older SuperMicro X9SCM-F motherboard. The main purpose of this build is for personal/home use: to store existing family photos and to use it as a backup of day-to-day files going forward (documents, drawings, photos, etc.). I plan to use Syncthing to seamlessly sync our "Documents" folders (and others) from our respective laptops to the FreeNAS box... and some other tool (rSync?) to back up data to that third 4 TB drive. In the near future, I'd like to be able to access files from outside the firewall, so some tool or setup to allow for that would be nice (NextCloud?). Apart from this, I don't have any other plans at the moment. Due to these tools, however, I expect to use Jails.

Adding the 60 GB SSD for Jails "...as its own one disk pool in the volume manager..." is that done during the FreeNAS installation process or after? When is it advised to do so if I go this route?

Thanks for your response!

 

[kdragon75]

You will do this after the wizard, I think. Its been so long.. I would just skip the wizard and use the User Guide.

 

[sretalla]

and some other tool (rSync?) to back up data to that third 4 TB drive

I would recommend using a replication task. You can set it up with localhost as the target system (need to look up the process for for setting the public key for the root account to make it work... I mentioned it in a post a long time back if you want to search on my name).

If you're familiar with rsync, it can probably do a good job too, but you need to set a task for it to launch automatically (so in my opinion about as much work as replication).

 

[r0b0ty]

Thanks to you both. I'll go ahead and try that, then: 60 GB SSD for Jails and I'll read up on replication. Thanks again!

 

[diskdiddler]

16GB is fine for boot, 64GB for jails / cache or something.

 

[anmnz]

60 GB SSD for Jails and I'll read up on replication.

I ran into an amusing problem recently with trying to replicate jail data.

iocage (the current jail manager used in FreeNAS) uses a custom mount point. So jails end up being created under /mnt/iocage/jails, not under a path that is specific to the pool that contains them.

I set up a pool consisting of a single SSD, told iocage to use that pool, and set up a ZFS replication task to back up the datasets on that pool to my main pool.

(The backups aren't really important. Any data it would trouble me to lose lives on the main pool, and is mounted from there back into the jails.)

This had the effect that both the original jail datasets and the replicated backups had the custom iocage mount point set on them, so sometimes the backups got mounted in place of the correct jail datasets. Much confusion ensued!

This is trivial to fix by setting flags on the zfs recv command that receives the replication stream but I don't see a way to do that for a replication job in the UI.

I ended up using rsync to do the backups instead which works just fine.

 

[sretalla]

I have also noticed that issue with replication of jails and had thought that it might be solved by setting the property of the replicated jail datasets canmount=noauto