Hi, hello, hola, Hallo.

[nightshade00013]

Just a geek here, lost a couple drives in my windows FS and going to switch to FreeNAS ASAP.

Started learning quite a bit already trolling around and reading. Had a Ventrilo server on my Windows box with ps3 media server and fileshare for my wife and I along with my mother in law who only needed read only, as well as print serving.

One drive will probably not be salvageable the other may be and hopefully will be as it was 2tb and only a couple years old. Had a storm when the 2tb one went down and I have a feeling that the board got fried as it is just doing seeks at spinup and then shuts down. No I didn't have backups for that drive, it's really on feasible to backup a drive with another drive IMHO, it was mainly movies but I would still prefer to recover it than have to extract and rebuild all the mp4's which will end up being a month worth of work.

I have a older 64bit system I am using right now as a "test" system to start learning. I am always short on funds so it will take me a while to build out the system I plan to use. For right now I have plex, samba, mumble (thanks for the video DrKK) and installed webmin today as a kind of test and so that if I want to move a file from one directory to another its an easy process from the browser rather than on another machine. The built in Java manager seems to work pretty well minus directories that are shared with another jail, I think it's permissions in there somewhere.

My old single core P4 system was good for ten years and I hope to build out a FreeNAS box that will last me another ten plus so I plan to do it right from the start, xeon, ecc, server board UPS, etc. Going to build my own case out so I can have huge airflow and keep the drives from overheating. Basically going to be a 3/4 ply wood wind tunnel with drives at the front behind 120mm fans and more 120mm fans exhausting. I figure somewhere around 400 to 600 cfm of airflow even with a filter in the front to keep the dust down.

I am a Major DIY guy, I fix most anything I can and build a lot of stuff as well. Last computer I bought was a gaming laptop for my wife and before that she had one that was thrown away and repaired, I fix my own vehicle at every chance I can to save money for more fun stuff. I love to drive and take trips as well as go shooting, even built my own rifle from a stripped lower to make it my way and save on the build costs.

Long introduction I know but figured I may as well get it over and do it right as I am sure some others would enjoy using the webmin as well which is an easy install that I already have on the webmin wiki which was missing for freebsd based systems.

NightShade

 

[cyberjock]

Welcome to the forum. If you are all about doing things right from the start, you'll like it here. ;)

 

[nightshade00013]

I try to do my best. Been reading a lot and was thinking about repurposing a phenom 2 x4 965 to the cause to do it a little cheaper and get things done sooner but that has since been turned in to my Mother in Law's computer. She is happy she got off an old lga775 pentium system with 3gb of ram anyway so I guess it's a win - win as I will end up with a better NAS in the end.

 

[nightshade00013]

So have the motherboard, X8dt6-f Supermicro. Cpu's, two Xeon E5640's. RAM, 24GB total that came with another almost identical board 6 X 4GB sticks. Pair of CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Evo's, way overkill and a PAIN to install and not have to remove the Supermicro built in backplate. PSU a Photon 850. And a pair of PNY 16GB usb thumb drives.

It is currently operating and I am going to switch the two small drives I have in my test bed to it so I can begin using it while I wait to pick up some 4tb drives and build out the case.

The Hyper 212 Evo's work great but I had to to pick up some M3x30 screws to use. I did not want to remove the cpu retention bracket which is attached to the cpu cooler mount. It would have been a pain to remove so what I did was remove the keeper from each screw on the cooler bracket and replace it with a M3X30 with the same springs and attach directly to the Supermicro Bracket. Simple easy and while it was just a little bit of work to get them attached they are holding great. I didn't have to try and find more brackets to make it work nor cut the tabs off the supermicro one.

Still have to build out a case and get the drives which will take a little while but it will be useable until then with the drives I have now. Going to update the SAS controller to v20 IT firmware. It's currently on v16 so that shouldn't be too hard to do.

 

[nightshade00013]

Moving the Plex install to new hardware.

So I had a test system setup with an AMD CPU Athlon 64 x2 to be exact and moved it to my Xeon system. I am not 100% sure but it seems that the Plex jail retains some settings that are particular to the cpu that it is installed on. The old system could play a movie with a little quality reduction but no matter what the setting I try Plex streams are very grainy in the new system which has MUCH more capability. Went ahead and installed a new jail with Plex and all is just fine with it. The original Plex install still functions ok and does fine streaming but the quality will jump up and down at random for seemingly no reason.

Not too worried about it as setting up a new jail and installing Plex is too easy to worry about but I did want to document my experience for anyone else as this may also become a factor when switching between Xeon cpu's that are newer and have different capabilities baked in. So far this has been the only problem I have had with moving the drives to the new hardware so it really is a minimum inconvenience for the system.

The new system has two new and larger flash drives so the old FreeNAS install was not transferred over.

 

[nightshade00013]

Ok, so had to change the design a little bit for a couple reasons, first off the cost of the 4U I got was too good to pass up and second I am set to have surgery on my shoulder in 7 days and I can't have a board sitting on a table while I am drugged for pain(percocet), sleep(lunesta) and nausea(zofran). Gotta lock my carry piece in the safe for a while too.

Anyway got a Rosewill RSV-L4500 for dirt cheap, it's not perfect but it will support the number of drives I need and since I will not have all 14 for a while I can space them out well. All my components fit pretty well just enough space for the eATX board. It's quieter than my desktop with decent airflow and with a few fan swaps will flow a lot of air. I had to do a little "cave man" engineering to make the hyper 212 evo's fit but a couple solid whacks with a rubber mallet in the right spots made it perfect. Since I will never mount this in a place where the fit has to be perfect a couple little dents is fine. If I had not already mounted the coolers I would just trim the tips of the copper off and been fine, it's literally a couple mm shy of fitting perfectly.

Was also able to go to 48GB of ram for nearly nothing, my father being in the process of building his bought a bunch and I got the extra's free and had to pick up two more but FreeNAS is loving it.

Got the UPS hooked up now as well so the only thing left to complete the build is the drives. I do have a 3TB WD green in it for now and when I can I will get the drives to build out the final pool. I know I didn't go with a seasonic PSU but the one I have has worked flawlessly so far and the modular setup has been great. It shipped with two EPS12v connectors and I had extra drive power cables so the one PSU can power all the drives, the MoBo and fans without any adapters or splitters and I don't have a bunch of 6 or 8 pin PCIe connectors floating around.

As far as the shoulder, I can't afford to have it done but since my wife and mother in law are both in worse condition than me in some ways I can't afford not to be able to help them either. Broke my clavicle and separated my shoulder (torn AC ligaments) 15 years ago. It has been a pain every day since, think of being a kid hanging by one arm on the monkey bars till your shoulder hurts. Now imagine never being able to let go...

 

[nightshade00013]

Well had a chance to pick up the junk they will have me on after the surgery. And after looking at it all I can confidentially say that if I post anything on or after the 14th of January that makes no sense feel free to ignore it and move on. Percocet for the pain and lunesta to knock me out for the first few days. Should be VERY interesting to say the least.

 

[nightshade00013]

Scored some 4GB HGST Deskstar NAS drives for less than the equivalent WD Red drives. 5 are already BadBlocked and two more are on the way.

Surgery went fairly well and I am up and moving. Found out that rather than the AC ligament tearing like a normal person it held and literally ripped the underlying bone from my clavicle. Had a large bone spur wearing at things and all the cartilage was gone in my AC joint. Stitches came out a few days ago and while I am still tender at times it's all moving pretty well. Pain is a ton less than I have lived with for almost half my life so I am overall in much better spirits.

Once the final two drives are done they will be put into a raidZ3 which should happen by the 9th or 10th of February at which point my system will be complete until it's time to add another vDev to the pool.

 

[nightshade00013]

Everything is up and running. Working GREAT.

Did a little goofing around since I was doing a review on the drives. Created a temporary dataset with compression turned off.


dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=1024000 count=50000
50000+0 records in
50000+0 records out
51200000000 bytes transferred in 95.467597 secs (536307623 bytes/sec)
dd if=testfile of=/dev/zero bs=1024000 count=50000
50000+0 records in
50000+0 records out
51200000000 bytes transferred in 59.494667 secs (860581335 bytes/sec)

If my calculations are correct that is a 47.68GB file written in 95.467597 seconds and read in 59.494667 seconds. In other terms write at 511.462805748MB/s and read at 820.714316368MB/s.

Now to pay off the drives and start saving for faster networking stuff or at least a managed switch so I can aggregate the gigabit ethernet on the server so more clients can access at full speed.

 

[Mirfster]

Nice to see things coming along. :)