Hi All

[wesser]

Good day to you all.
I have today stumbled across FreeNAS and I must say it looks a fantastic piece to work.
I have just spent many hours reading the PDF manual and I'm am now totally confused. I considered myself pretty IT literate until reading that.
My original plan I started out with was to build another Win 7 machine populated with 4*2TB drives 2 at first then add the other 2 later as funds allow. These were just going to be simple mirrors mostly for serving movies (1080p HD) and music to my pc's around the house along with the usual photos and documents but mostly for the movies. The clients will at the moment all be win 7 machines with 2 of them running XBMC and also to act as a remote drive for my satellite pvr.
Hardware wise I have already ordered my case which takes an ITX main board and has 4 hot swap bays. I have been looking at an ASUS board to run an i3 processor and planning on 8GB of ram.
I want to end up with as much storage capacity as I possible with my setup but after reading the guide I'm not sure exactly what sort of RAID setup to go with or the most appropriate type of share to use.
I think most of the information I have been reading is aimed at the higher more critical end or the IT spectrum compared to my own intended use.
So I was hoping some of you could share some experience with me or push me in the right direction.
I must admit to being more windows literate than I am with Linux distros that said I do like the open source platforms and although I find my lack of knowledge frustrating I also enjoy learning as I go following the work of others.

Thank you for reading.

Wes

 

[cubix]

Hi Wes,

RaidZ will give you 6TB usable space and 2TB for parity incase a drive fails. Unfortunately you aren't going to be able to go from a 2 drive mirror to RaidZ without backing up all your data first. I'm running XBMC on a jailbroken Apple TV and all media is accessed wirelessly from my FreeNAS box.

What PVR do you have?

Hang in there, FreeNAS is pretty simple to install and set up, just a few new concepts for us windows boys.

-cubix

 

[SilverJS]

Wes,

Welcome aboard! I'm sure you'll enjoy the journey. I certainly don't pretend to be a specialist myself (most of my posts are for dumb questions, I'll admit!), but I remember being in the situation you're in. =) FreeNAS is very easy to set up for the initial user, but - and someone else should confirm this - I don't think it's that easy to simply add a drive to the pool, should you choose to go with ZFS (which I really think you should do). I *think* it's possible, but I'm pretty sure it must be the exact same size as all the others in the array. I'm not gonna lie, the details are fuzzy - I just remember the impression I was left with, after my research, that it was simply much simpler to build the whole pool right at the onset. My current setup sees 7 X 3TB drives, in a RAIDZ2 setup - that is, four data drives, two parity drives, and one hot spare. So, I have 10.7 TB of storage, with two parity drives.

The whole thing works beautifully - and, drive replacement is a cinch. I actually had one fail a few weeks ago, so it happens. =)

Your hardware choices are fine, but I seem to recall reading that FreeBSD (the system FreeNAS is based on) in its ZFS flavours was more partial to the AMD64 architecture. In any case, I'm sure an i3 will do just fine. I went a bit overboard - looking back, a simple RaidZ (one parity drive) would probably have been just fine, and have yielded me more storage. I certainly didn't need to bother with the hot spare, I think...=) Anyhow, my setup is quite similar to yours - FreeNAS server, and two W7 machines running XBMC. One of those machines is also running MySQL for the XBMC database, but I'm planning on eventually migrate that to the FreeNAS box as well, as soon as the plugin architecture of 8.2 is ready for prime-time. The box also houses my iTunes library, so I can bypass iTunes' frustratingly inconsistent Home Share disaster. So far, no complaints at all. You won't regret it, and you'll learn a ton.

Enjoy, and post up - the people here are quite helpful.

Cheers!

 

[StephenFry]

drive replacement is a cinch.

I have to disagree. While setting up FreeNAS is indeed very simple indeed, I'm glad I'm currently doing some learning and testing on how to replace a drive - because it's NOT going smoothly at all. If I had actual data on my NAS, I'd be screaming right about now.

 

[wesser]

Hi Guys
Thank you for the welcome. I have to say that after reading through several threads on here, this seems to be a very good community forum where those that know share thier knowledge and those that don't know get the help they want. So many forums today seem to be full of people that know and only talk to those that also know or put down others trying to learn.

Your comments are all very promising and encouraging, so I am going to jump in with both feet and build a new system. It will most likely be overkill but I don't want to build too cheap and then start using it only to find I have to start again.

I don't have any raid setup at the moment so I'll be setting up clean and copy files over so I have a back up if all goes pear shaped first time.

As far as replacing failed drives I have tried hardware and software raids in the past and I have never found it easy to replace drives when they actually fail.
I even totalled my mail server once trying to rebuild the failed drive the wrong way round, Whoops we all learn.

 

[StephenFry]

Reading about your intended usage and wish for capacity, I'd say try and spring for a 6 drive RAIDZ2. This will give excellent availability/security. Four drives in RAID5/Z makes me shudder. Three (2 data, 1 parity) is the limit for single parity for me.

 

[ProtoSD]

I have to disagree. While setting up FreeNAS is indeed very simple indeed, I'm glad I'm currently doing some learning and testing on how to replace a drive - because it's NOT going smoothly at all. If I had actual data on my NAS, I'd be screaming right about now.

You are not alone. Out of all the great stuff the developers have done, this is the one thing I can't believe has been left this long to get done properly. I really think all the "other" people screaming for *Plugins* has taken precedence over getting important stuff like this working flawlessly. I think with 8.2 we'll finally start to see some of this fixed right. Keep in mind, there are only 4 or 5 regular developers working on FreeNAS 8...

 

[wesser]

So guys which one do I go for 8.0.4 or 8.2.0 beta???

Also am I correct in thinking I need 2 usb sticks 1 to install from and 1 to install to??

 

[SilverJS]

To those having issues with drive replacement : It actually turned out to be pretty simple for me. The most onerous part is figuring out which drive is "ada2" or whichever it is. Now, I'll gladly acknowledge that can be difficult - I have a PCI-E SATA expansion card, and FreeNAS can't see the serial numbers of the drives on that - but there's only two. The rest it can see, so it's just a matter of finding it amongst your drive. I was lucky in that the drive failed entirely, so I couldn't even see it in the BIOS, which made it dead-easy. Anyhow - I remember dealing with all this through the GUI. In Volumes, one has only to remove the disk (there are buttons to this effect), then physically take the disk out. Then, again in the GUI, one can click the button to Replace the disk. That's how it went for me, anyhow. FreeNAS promptly started resilvering, and everything was good. Sorry to hear you guys are having a hard time...?

For the actual install, I can't remember - as I recall (but it's faint), I did it with an external DVD drive as my server does not have an optical drive. After that, upgrades are dead-easy via the GUI. So it doesn't matter much which version you choose, but I'd stay away from the BETA ones if you're starting out.

 

[StephenFry]

So guys which one do I go for 8.0.4 or 8.2.0 beta???
Also am I correct in thinking I need 2 usb sticks 1 to install from and 1 to install to??

Might be interesting: my machine(s) had some trouble booting from one usb stick and then installing on another -- until I added the second stick *after* the FreeNAS setup stick had booted. One of those strange behaviors that might take long to figure out.

Considering the problems I have with 804, I'd say try 820, but keep in mind that a version with ZFS v28 is on the horizon and that is IMO when things get interesting.

 

[wesser]

What makes you say things get interesting??
In a good way or bad way??

 

[StephenFry]

In a good way! This forum's very own protosd has made a FreeNAS build which included v28 support, which you can find at http://protosd.blogspot.com
There are many improvements from v15 and hopefully few regressions ;)