Hello! I'm new to FreeNAS and I'm sure I'll need help.

[Fredcampbe]

Hey, My name is Fred and I'm a long time IT person in the Windows environment (Don't blame me it's how I make a living). I've played around quite a bit with Linux and personally prefer it a lot over Windows. I just bought a Dell PowerEdge server with 15TB of hard drive and 32Gb of memory off Ebay for $250 to start exploring NAS servers for my clients. It came with FreeNAS installed, well sort of. It had one huge hardware RAID drive with FreeNAS on it. I figured out quickly that was a big waste of what could be a great storage system. I replaced 2 of the 3TB drives with 2 300GB 15K SAS drives I had on hand and configured them as RAID 1. I setup an additional RAID 5 Drive with 4 3TB drives. So I have lots of space. I've installed FreeNAS Corral on the 300GB drive and set the others as a data drive. Now I just need to figure out how to best configure and use it. Most of my clients are Windows users (small businesses) that operate in workgroups instead of domains. So getting this setup to support for them may be a challenge. They want to store data that is shared and also data that is private to each user. That seems to be an issue with FreeNAS Corral. As I work through it I would appreciate any support you can offer. Thanks and it's great to be apart of your group.

 

[gpsguy]

Welcome to the forums!

Hardware RAID and ZFS are a bad combination. Either replace the controller with a proper HBA or see if you can flash your current controller to IT mode.

 

[Spearfoot]

Hey, My name is Fred and I'm a long time IT person in the Windows environment (Don't blame me it's how I make a living). I've played around quite a bit with Linux and personally prefer it a lot over Windows. I just bought a Dell PowerEdge server with 15TB of hard drive and 32Gb of memory off Ebay for $250 to start exploring NAS servers for my clients. It came with FreeNAS installed, well sort of. It had one huge hardware RAID drive with FreeNAS on it. I figured out quickly that was a big waste of what could be a great storage system. I replaced 2 of the 3TB drives with 2 300GB 15K SAS drives I had on hand and configured them as RAID 1. I setup an additional RAID 5 Drive with 4 3TB drives. So I have lots of space. I've installed FreeNAS Corral on the 300GB drive and set the others as a data drive. Now I just need to figure out how to best configure and use it. Most of my clients are Windows users (small businesses) that operate in workgroups instead of domains. So getting this setup to support for them may be a challenge. They want to store data that is shared and also data that is private to each user. That seems to be an issue with FreeNAS Corral. As I work through it I would appreciate any support you can offer. Thanks and it's great to be apart of your group.

@gpsguy is correct about RAID vs HBA controllers; FreeNAS works best with direct control of the disks.

Regarding shares... FreeNAS supports the standard SMB shares we know and love in the Windows world, and you can certainly configure private vs. public shares and so forth. Quite a few resources here on the forum deal with this subject.

Regarding Corral: I do not recommend it for any business or production use at this time. It's too new and untried. I suggest you stay with FreeNAS 9.10 for these purposes until iXsystems (the sponsor of the FreeNAS project) begins shipping Corral to its paying customers.

 

[Fredcampbe]

Thanks for your advice and I am in the process of reloading my server with FreeNAS 9.10. I'm sure I'll be back with more issues.

 

[Fredcampbe]

Just wanted to post an update to my ventures with FreeNAS. I reloaded my box with 9.10 and it is great. I put in 2 160GB VelociRaptor drives for the OS and they work great. Very fast. I Installed 8TB of disks for Volumes. I have them all setup with public and private shares that are available to Windows, Linux and Mac computers and they all work great. I connected to my network via 4 Gigabit ports through a Cisco Gigabit managed router and aggregated the ports in FreeNAS and boy is it fast. I can move data over the network at 10 times the speed of doing so on my Windows Server 2016 box. Next time I'd say I can set this server up in under 2 hours from start to finish. I can just imagine what it would work like on newer hardware. I am using the Pecr 6/I RAID controller with no problems so far.

I read a lot of post on here about people having problems setting up public and private shares for windows. I found it very simple. I read the documentation and just followed the instructions. It took a couple of trial and error attempts but in the end is works just as it should. Surprisingly I had the most trouble getting Linux to work. It was a configuration issue with my Linux box and once I fixed that all was well.

I did a lot of reading on this forum before I even started to work on setting up FreeNAS and it really paid off. Thanks to everyone for all the good info. I like to do my homework before I start work and I found all the tools I needed right here to accomplish that. Great site and I look forward to using it a lot more in the future. Thanks

 

[gpsguy]

I'm glad to hear things are working for you.

I'm still curious how you configured the drives with your Perc 6i RAID controller. Did you use the controller to create the RAID1 and RAID5 arrays? If so, it will probably create problems for FreeNAS at some point. Are you able to read the SMART data from the drives?

I replaced 2 of the 3TB drives with 2 300GB 15K SAS drives I had on hand and configured them as RAID 1. I setup an additional RAID 5 Drive with 4 3TB drives. .

 

[Fredcampbe]

I did use the Perc 6/I to setup my RAIDs. I set the 2 OS drives as RAID1 and the 4 2TB drives I set as individual RAID0 drives. Then I used FreeNAS to make larger volumes. The SMART drives are reading fine. It seems to be working great. I wouldn't set it up this way for a customer but for my use and testing it's fine. I have an older HP server with HBA controller. I'm going to set that up next and see how they compare.

 

[Fredcampbe]

I have ran into one small issue but it's not a big problem. The home version of windows will not connect to the server at all. I can see the server but it says I don't have permissions. I have 2 laptops with the home version so I will just upgrade them to pro and it should be fine.