Intro and Build

[travanx]

I have a small business from home and for backups we are using a Synology with 2x Red drives syncing with google drive. Been happy with this so far, but I know once we get larger we need a better solution. Even if its just a couple of people we hire.

I also have a huge stack of broken hard drives since around 1998 sitting in the closet. And my last WD green drive bit the dust as I made a new PC build a few months ago. Our media for the house is currently sitting on a single external hard drive connected to my router, which after a while gets old when that breaks and have to redo the media. I would also like a second place to store pictures.

With a little extra money coming in I found out about freenas from another forum. And decided now would be a good time to start with a home storage solution anticipating getting another in the next year or so.

The ordering began after reading through the forums for a week and watching youtube videos. Waiting on

PC: Lenovo TS140
Ram: Extra 8GB Crucial ECC
HD: 5x 3TB WD Red
Sandisk 4GB USB drive

For now I want to see how this work with 12GB total (4GB and 8GB) of ram. Storage seems like plenty. The server has AMT, which sounds nice and similar to the supermicro mb's. We use a Raspberry Pi (raspbmc) and Dune HD Smart media player for video and those have been working fine on the external USB drive.

One thing that never worked was playing mp3 files from my shared Windows 8.1 PC on the receiver. And one TV that has plex on it, never ever worked right, I think their forums finally removed that particular forum. These are most likely Windows issues, so I have my fingers crossed that freenas just works with these devices. Throwing all of this out there as I wait for everything to arrive.

A huge plus is that I can backup my work stuff to yet another location.

 

[travanx]

Got everything earlier today and learned some new stuff. It was pretty easy to fit the 5-3TB drives in the case. I was able to use a a bracket from my Fractal Node 304 to loosely sit 2 drives on the bottom of the case. The motherboard has 2 SATA cables from the factory and 5 total SATA power hookups. Need to find a way to mount another fan to run over these drives and then clean the cabling up.

More pictures at http://imgur.com/a/E75pa#0

I don't have a VGA monitor to hook to the TS140. Overlooked that as I thought I could configure AMT headless. I ended up using a displayport adapter, and DVI to DP was a go. Reset the machine to stock since that's what Lenovo says to do. Nothing about AMT in the bios, so I give up on figuring that out. Booted from the USB flash drive. That worked fine. Freenas just worked. So after a bit more fiddling around I was able to get the server to boot with nothing attached. Hint: You can disable the no keyboard error in the bios and just boot from the flash drive. I think you should be able to boot with just a keyboard and USB flash drive attached and be off and running.

I have now spent the last 7 hours trying to figure out how to set this thing up. I was able to search, search, search until things started to work. After I got the basic permissions set, I wiped the flash drive, and started over to get a better feeling for what was going on. I now have all the plugins I want running in separate jails and can work from freenas on my Windows 8.1 machine.

 

[Ericloewe]

I don't think I'd trust a PSU that doesn't even list the power of its 3.3V and 5V rails...

 

[Len_Nas]

I have been running a TS140 since December 2013. Glad you got 5 discs running, any issues? My next purchase would be +3 discs. I am not a poster... just a lurker. I got a lot of info from this forum and my biggest issue was the WD Red drives with 'WRITE_FPDMA_QUEUED' issue and also the LCC count. I thought they where separate issues, but wdidle fixed them both.

I don't think I'd trust a PSU that doesn't even list the power of its 3.3V and 5V rails...

Yes the PSU is a concern. It is also not a standard, it has different cables and is expensive to replace.

 

[travanx]

No issues so far.

 

[travanx]

Had my first drive give bad sectors last night. Did a scrub in anticipation of the new drive. Started the resilvering. Anyone that cares I am running RaidZ1 with 5x3TB WD Red drives, important stuff is backed up elsewhere, Netflix is my media backup.

Currently the process is running at 370M/s and will take approx 6 hours. The odd thing about this, is that the failing hard drive, was in a spot meant for a hard drive in this case. From the picture earlier, the middle right with the purple pull out.

I started getting the errors. First it was 1 sector. Than ran a smart test, 2 sectors. And it slowly was giving more errors. Still liking this case, just need to add some fans over the drives.?.?

 

[Bidule0hm]

What are the temps of the drives?

 

[Len_Nas]

In my TS140, I just added a 5th drive 2 weeks ago. I have it hooked up where the DVD drive was, so minimal air flow. Currently my drives have been running at 27-32C, with the 5th drive at 32C (watching it like a hawk). I have not run a scrub yet, but did set up the emails for when the temp hits 39C . I would like to put a fan there, but I have not found a good one yet.

 

[Bidule0hm]

As long as they stay under 40 °C it's fine. Your drive has probably died of a natural death :)

 

[travanx]

What are the temps of the drives?

That one was 37c when I got the problem email. Forgot what the others were running at. Natural death? Ugh at least this one should be under warranty. Old drive date: Feb 4, 2014, new drive is Feb 2015 from Amazon. 3 hours until its done.

 

[Bidule0hm]

Natural death includes infant mortality, that's why it's strongly recommended to burn-in the drives before using them ;)

 

[travanx]

That was pretty painless. Next drive this happens to, I am putting all new larger drives in.