is freenas overkill for my needs since the hardware requirements?

[delino]

I really need to be reassured and advise for my 1 year old Freenas system.

MB: Asus P8 B75M/CSM
RAM: Kingston Non-ECC - 8G

Volume 1 : (2x 2T Green WD) - mirror-0 - ZFS - (my very important stuff - pictures )
Volume 2 : (1x 300G) - stripes - ZFS - ( not important stuff)
Volume 3 : (1x 2T Seagate 7200) - stripes - ZFS ( music & movies - for streaming)

I bought everything brand new, one year ago, i'm running freenas 9.1.1 and the only plugin i use is Mediaplex. Everything works perfectly and i'm very satisfied/impressed with Mediaplex, it's awesome.

My original needs were to centralize my big hardware to a closet, share/stream data with all my devices and automatically backup only the data in volume 1. That's it. I choose Freenas one year ago and i'm pretty satisfied until now (since no hard disk crashed yet... )

The problem is that, i saw a lot of writing about bad hardware resulting in the lost of data. I just realized that apparently 8G is not enough RAM, my RAM isn't ECC and mirroring (RAID 1) isn't really that safe... I really have the feeling that my system isn't gonna provide me a robust backup for my volume 1.

My questions are: is freenas overkill for my needs? Is my system hardwary as robust as a Apple Time Machine or other commercial system?

thanks

 

[cyberjock]

Ok, here's the advice I can give. Most of what you read was probably written by me. So here's what I'd do:

Without ECC RAM, if your non-ECC RAM goes bad, kiss all zpools goodbye. If you do online automated backups of those zpools(rsync or zfs replication), you can kiss those goodbye too. But, if your non-ECC RAM never goes bad, you'll never have a problem. It's a cliff, and once you go over the edge there's only one way to go... down.

Now, you could easily go to UFS for your important "I don't wanna lose it" stuff(Volume 1) and not have the potential problems if your RAM fails. You'll have some corruption of new files and such, but the majority of your data will probably be untouched.

As for your other misgivings, its like this... If you are happy with the performance and feel that your system is reliable enough for your data, stick with it. On the other hand, if you have a concern of RAM going bad(which seems to be happening more frequently lately) then you should decide what to do.

Server's aren't cheap. So how much is your data worth to ensure its safe? If its worth $370, go with the Supermicro X9SCM-F, Pentium G2020, and 16GB of ECC RAM. If you want to spend a little more you can go with 32GB of RAM. If you want to do stuff that is CPU intensive like plex transcoding then you'll want something like the E3-1230V2 CPU.

So you should ask yourself what its worth for a good reliable server(especially since you already have a server). Money is tight on my house, but I prefer to build it once and forget about it, so I went with the X9SCM-F motherboard, E3-1230V2, and 32GB of ECC RAM. That will hopefully last me at least 5 years.

Seeing the sudden and catastrophic failure of non-ECC RAM has convinced me to never trust a file server with non-ECC RAM ever again. But, there's plenty of people that will argue that ECC RAM isn't worth the money.

But the real question is "how much is your data worth to you?"

 

[delino]

Thanks Cyberjock for your quick reply. Of course my data is very important for me, but money is also very important... thus, i need to find a good comprise between cash, effort/time and the risk of loosing data. Then, i will need to manage that risk.

Money wise, i have no intension to change either my MB or processor - the performance of my system is ok (streaming and sharing wise)

My dilemma right now is :

option 1 : keep my 8G non-ECC ram - reformat my volume to UFS (like you proposed)
option 2: sell my 8G non-ECC ram - buy 16G ECC RAM - keep everything in ZFS

of course option 2 is more tempting but i need to price it.

in both case, i might manually (or over a script & cron) copy all my important data on an 2TB-external-NTFS formated-hard drive (over CIFS) that i already have.

Question:
1. do you thing is it a good strategy
2. any recommendation for ECC-RAM ? brand / model, what to avoid.

again, thank you very much for your help.

 

[titan_rw]

There's ZERO point in buying ECC ram if your motherboard or CPU don't support it. ECC requires all 3 components to be ecc enabled to work: RAM, CPU, and MB. No point doing just one.

 

[delino]

Oups, i assumed my MB and processor would support ECC. After a quick research i realized not - Seems i was wrong again...
I guess UFS option is what i need to do.


To do that, i guess i need to reformat my zfs mirror-0 volume (meaning to copy everything on an other disk) - format in UFS /mount mirror0 - then copy back everything on the new mirror-0 UFS volume.

 

[cyberjock]

To do that, i guess i need to reformat my zfs mirror-0 volume (meaning to copy everything on an other disk) - format in UFS /mount mirror0 - then copy back everything on the new mirror-0 UFS volume.

Yep. Also keep in mind that there's talk of getting rid of 32-bit support and potentially UFS support in as little as a year or so. No date has been set and its not even for sure that this will happen. Just something to think about....

 

[delino]

Thanks to both of you.
My conclusion is that i will backup my stuff as i use to do: i.e. external hard drive- i can't afford the hardware for the freenas backup solution.
My processor is 64 bit.
I will keep everything as is (zfs all the way) and will make sure to backup manually.

Last question:
If my ram fails, i understand that i will loose everything except my manual external backup.
If one of my mirrored-0 disk fails, and all the sector of the other disk are good, i will be able to recover, right? and SMART is the tool i need to test my disk sectors recurrently.

 

[cyberjock]

Thanks to both of you.
My conclusion is that i will backup my stuff as i use to do: i.e. external hard drive- i can't afford the hardware for the freenas backup solution.
My processor is 64 bit.
I will keep everything as is (zfs all the way) and will make sure to backup manually.

Keep in mind if you do the backup and your RAM is bad, your backups will be trashed. That's one reason why I push for ECC over non-ECC so much. You can trash your data and backups without being any wiser. It's not a matter of if you do it manually or not. It's the fact that the data being read from and written to the pool will be trashed and ZFS won't be able to necessary repair in RAM since the RAM itself is damaged.

If one of my mirrored-0 disk fails, and all the sector of the other disk are good, i will be able to recover, right? and SMART is the tool i need to test my disk sectors recurrently.

With just 1 disk in a mirror of 2 disks, yes.

SMART doesn't work with external media. You cannot do SMART monitoring or testing via USB. That's one of several reasons why USB drives aren't recommended for server setup. They're great for moving data, but that's about it.

 

[delino]

I thing i wasn't clear: by manually backup i meant copy from my freenas volume to an other computer hard disk(my windows PC for example) via CIFS or FTP or what ever.

I was planing to use SMART only on my Freenas internal harddisk in order to anticipate harddisk failures.

thanks