Joining the FreeNAS family

[Ericloewe]

I think I'd better just stay with the AsRock that has the extra 6 Marvel SATA

They seem to have a 50/50 chance of not working.

 

[PhilZJ81]

Okay, well hopefully I'll be lucky... I just ordered all the parts, going with AsRock board and 6x HGST 6TB NAS drives.
I'm guessing that I can use the 2 Sata3 and 4 Sata2 ports to create one single RaidZ2 array. And from there create my own folders or datasets inside. My assumption is that since array isn't hardware managed, so as long as the FreeNAS software can access the drives, the SATA port is not important.

 

[PhilZJ81]

Well, I'm dumb.

So yesterday, I received most of my parts for my NAS, all that's missing is 2 of the 4 drives and a cable to convert the usb 3.0 on the case to 2.0. So I thought, meh, I'll run the long smart test overnight with the disk cage out of the box. (the Silverstone DS380 has an enclosure where you stack all your HDDs so you can remove them). I wake up this morning, curious to see how the smart test went, and I touch the case, it was HOT. Looked in FreeNAS to see the temps, I couldn't so Google to the rescue, found some scripts. Ran those 69-73C range for the 4 drives... DOH. I shut it down, put the drive stack inside the case where 2 large fans blow on it, turned it back on, temps dropped to the high 50s low 60s, but that's still pretty darn hot! I shut it down now, I'll wait for it to cool down completely and boot it up again. I'm hoping I didn't damage any drives, but ya, wanted to share my stupidity with you guys, bet you guys are proud to have me as a member of the forum now :)

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

69-73C range for the 4 drives... DOH

Unfortunately this is likely to reduce the lifespan of the drives. Make sure you have SMART checks, SMART tests and email notifications working when you get the system up and running.

 

[PhilZJ81]

Unfortunately this is likely to reduce the lifespan of the drives. Make sure you have SMART checks, SMART tests and email notifications working when you get the system up and running.

Do you mean it has already reduce their life, or continued use at those temperatures will result in lifespan loss?

I'm wondering if there is something different about those drives and they just run hotter. I bought 6 HGST drives, 2 from 1 seller (only had 2 in stock) and 4 from Amazonfullfilment. The 4 from Amazon's serial number begin with K1G and they run 5-7 degrees warmer than the 2 I got from the other seller (Serial starting with NCG). They are all sandwiched together in the case and have been running all day. The 4 Amazon ones are 47-49C range running a long smart test, while the other 2 are 42-42C also running the smart test.

What do you guys make of that?

I tried to plug in an extra Seagate 6TB i had laying around in my case, it spooled up, but it never showed up under "View Disks", it was using one of the marvel controllers though, so I might have to see what's going on there in bios. That'll have to wait till I the smart tests finish though. I know the Seagate runs very hot too though. I have another one identical that I use an external docking station with, and after an hour of file transfers, that drive is hard to hold in your hand...

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Do you mean it has already reduce their life, or continued use at those temperatures will result in lifespan loss?

Both. The first is something you can't change after the fact, so just move on and try to address the current running temperatures. Try to keep all your drives below 40C as much as possible.

I'm wondering if there is something different about those drives and they just run hotter

Maybe some are 7,200RPM and some are <6,000RPM. Higher RPM drives tend to run hotter.

I have another one identical that I use an external docking station with, and after an hour of file transfers, that drive is hard to hold in your hand...

I use a USB powered fan to keep drives cool in docking stations. Convection cooling is not enough.

 

[PhilZJ81]

Both. The first is something you can't change after the fact, so just move on and try to address the current running temperatures. Try to keep all your drives below 40C as much as possible.

Maybe some are 7,200RPM and some are <6,000RPM. Higher RPM drives tend to run hotter.

I use a USB powered fan to keep drives cool in docking stations. Convection cooling is not enough.

Regarding the hard drives with different running temps, all 6 drives are exactly the same HGST 6TB drive with the same specs.
They all are "
HGST Deskstar NAS 3.5-Inch 6TB 7200RPM SATA III 128MB Cache Internal Hard Drive (0S03839)
"
ordered through amazon, it's just that 1 vendor ran out of stock so not all came form the same location. But the should be the 'same' drive.

Also, early this morning I added another drive to the pilup, a (
Seagate 6TB Desktop HDD SATA 6Gb/s NCQ 128MB Cache 7200RPM 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive ST6000DM001
)
to be specific and he's just running at 36C.

Ya, good idea about the fan, it's a shame these docking stations don't have a built in blower. They have their own power supply, why not add a fan to it!

 

[blahhumbug]

I'm using 2x SATA3 on the Marvell SE9172 on the Asrock board for my Freenas system. I have 6 disks on intel sata, 2 on marvell. I avoided using the SE9230 sata ports due to some reliability issues others have reported with that controller.

I've had not a single problem with those 2 marvell ports, but my experience may not match yours. My workloads are plex streaming, occasional CIFS backup writes, and a handful of jails running some services like ttrss and owncloud, all in a single user environment.

 

[PhilZJ81]

Well, I wanted to do a final follow up to my thread.

As it turns out the annoying buzz I was hearing with my build was the fan motor on the Silverstone power supply. After reading more reviews, it seems that many have this problem, and also many suffer PSU failures after a few months. So, those factors, in addition to the Silvestone DS380B case lacking the cooling needed to keep my drives cool. I decided to get a new case and power supply. The Case is a Lian Li PC-Q26B and the power supply is : EVGA 220-G2-0550-Y1 80 PLUS GOLD 550W . So far I'm pretty happy. The power supply is completely silent now, even with ECO mode turned off (fan always spinning). The case is also quiet, I did have an annoying rattle, turns out it was the slider to lock the hard drives in place. If I put it all the way in the locked position, it rattles, if I lift it just a bit, it's fine.

My Hard Drives now operate at 36C and while copying lots of files for extended periods of time (hours) one or maybe 2 in the middle will reach 40C.

Overall, I really like this case, but there are a few things that I think could be better.
1) I'm not a fan of the snap-in panels.
2) to remove / clean the dust filters on the intakes, you have to remove both side panels. (by contrast my PC case, Antec P182 has a little flap you open for each filter, for easy cleanup.
3) I find the front inlets are small. As you can see from the pictures they are on each side of the case, but are very narrow, the front part of the case is solid aluminum.
4) no filter for the power supply air intake at the bottom of the case. (Plus even if there was one, good luck getting to it)

About the PSU, so far I love everything about it, nice long cables, 9 Sata power connections, super quiet even with fan always running. The only complaint I had with it, is the MB power cable, where all the many wires start forming a circle (from their flat layout at the connector) is too thick and very hard so It didn't fit properly to route it behind the motherboard and up through the designated power connector cutout.

I lost the hot swap ability from the SilverStone DS380 case. Also one nice feature with that case, is that each HDD had it's own 'activity' light. The Lian Li does come with 1 hot swap backplane that can handle 2 drives. But I decided to remove it and just directly connect each drive. Plus the DS380 provided some nice capacitors to offset the power draw when a disk spools off, the lian li didn't have that.

I also have Plex setup. I tried to update to FreeNAS 9.10, (all I had setup at that point were 2 CIFS shares...) but it failed, got some error when entering the guid. At this time, I'm too dumb to properly trouble shoot it, but I have plex going now, I started copying my data from my computers to the NAS box, so at this point I'm happy with 9.3. I'm hoping to become more familiar with it and take the plunge with 10.x whenever that becomes a stable release.

Thanks again to everyone that helped me on the forum so far!