Hi,
I've been dabbling with Freenas for nearly 2 years. My current system is a 6 core i7, 32GB Ram (non-ECC (I know)), 12-2TB Sata drives in RAIDZ2, 2 SSDs mirrored for Jails and 1 SSD for OS. I have a bunch of jails running Plex, Plex Connect, Sabnabd, Couchpotato, Sickbeard and Owncloud. I have not seen more than 8 streams off of this box yet. Most people watching are throttled to 4mb/s so lots of transcoding. (Almost) Never a hiccup. I have tried doing an iSCSI connection to a VMware server, the iSCSI connection would randomly drop, so I gave that up. Since I'm almost out of capacity, for the interim, I though I would do an iSCSI connection between a QNAP box and Freenas (direct GigE connection). The system eventually hangs and I need to do hard reboot on Freenas. So I gave this up and am just using an SMB connection for now.
I was settled on a new server. 16-4TB WD. I have flashed 2 IBM M1015. Currently a server class MB, 2 core Xeon processor with 16GB of RAM. For testing purposes, I have a (data1) volume setup as RaidZ2 on one controller using 4 drives and another (data2) volume setup on a separate controller card in RaidZ2. Over the network between the QNAP and this new server I can transfer 10GB files at roughly 330mb/s (peak 450Mb/s). I believe this to be the limitation of the QNAP. My Observations: While copying from the Qnap to data1, I'm getting ~330Mb/s. During this time if I copy a 10GB file from data1 to data2 I get 1.63Gb/s Without the transfer from the Qnap to Freenas data1, I can copy from data1 to data2 at 1.63Bb/s. I noticed compression was enabled by default and read that there should be no performance hit. I disabled compression and copying between data1 to data2 when up to 1.85Gb/s. CPU and RAM requirements when up drastically, but still had extra to go.
I originally wanted to merge the old volume with the new volume to create one large volume. When playing last night, this does not work well from a storage perspective.
Q1: Is there a way to merge 2 volumes together, "scrub" them and create 1 large volume with RAIDZ3, not losing any data (from what I have read, it looks like a NO).
Q2: Is there a limitation join the number of drives I can put on to the same volume because I was thinking of just going out and getting a Supermicro chassis that can take 24 drives and putting all 24 drives into a single volume with RAIDZ3 (this is strictly for storage, jails drives are mirrored SSD and the boot drive is a single SSD)?
Q3: Is there away to build multiple Freenas devices to create a "storage cloud". So, when I run out of space and capacity on a system, I just add another system to the cloud to increase the volume size?
Q4: My first system is taking a couple of days to re-silver a 2TB drive with a 4TB drive. My system is running at 80% capacity. Should it take this long? Have I done anything wrong from the "simple process" of taking a drive off line, replacing the drive then re-silvering? Is there a more effective way to do this?
Q5: Aside from moving my jails on to remote servers (VMware) and connecting via iSCSI, any better ideas for a solution.
This box is not a commercial box, this is strictly for my own personal use (clearly an expensive but rewarding hobby).
I've been dabbling with Freenas for nearly 2 years. My current system is a 6 core i7, 32GB Ram (non-ECC (I know)), 12-2TB Sata drives in RAIDZ2, 2 SSDs mirrored for Jails and 1 SSD for OS. I have a bunch of jails running Plex, Plex Connect, Sabnabd, Couchpotato, Sickbeard and Owncloud. I have not seen more than 8 streams off of this box yet. Most people watching are throttled to 4mb/s so lots of transcoding. (Almost) Never a hiccup. I have tried doing an iSCSI connection to a VMware server, the iSCSI connection would randomly drop, so I gave that up. Since I'm almost out of capacity, for the interim, I though I would do an iSCSI connection between a QNAP box and Freenas (direct GigE connection). The system eventually hangs and I need to do hard reboot on Freenas. So I gave this up and am just using an SMB connection for now.
I was settled on a new server. 16-4TB WD. I have flashed 2 IBM M1015. Currently a server class MB, 2 core Xeon processor with 16GB of RAM. For testing purposes, I have a (data1) volume setup as RaidZ2 on one controller using 4 drives and another (data2) volume setup on a separate controller card in RaidZ2. Over the network between the QNAP and this new server I can transfer 10GB files at roughly 330mb/s (peak 450Mb/s). I believe this to be the limitation of the QNAP. My Observations: While copying from the Qnap to data1, I'm getting ~330Mb/s. During this time if I copy a 10GB file from data1 to data2 I get 1.63Gb/s Without the transfer from the Qnap to Freenas data1, I can copy from data1 to data2 at 1.63Bb/s. I noticed compression was enabled by default and read that there should be no performance hit. I disabled compression and copying between data1 to data2 when up to 1.85Gb/s. CPU and RAM requirements when up drastically, but still had extra to go.
I originally wanted to merge the old volume with the new volume to create one large volume. When playing last night, this does not work well from a storage perspective.
Q1: Is there a way to merge 2 volumes together, "scrub" them and create 1 large volume with RAIDZ3, not losing any data (from what I have read, it looks like a NO).
Q2: Is there a limitation join the number of drives I can put on to the same volume because I was thinking of just going out and getting a Supermicro chassis that can take 24 drives and putting all 24 drives into a single volume with RAIDZ3 (this is strictly for storage, jails drives are mirrored SSD and the boot drive is a single SSD)?
Q3: Is there away to build multiple Freenas devices to create a "storage cloud". So, when I run out of space and capacity on a system, I just add another system to the cloud to increase the volume size?
Q4: My first system is taking a couple of days to re-silver a 2TB drive with a 4TB drive. My system is running at 80% capacity. Should it take this long? Have I done anything wrong from the "simple process" of taking a drive off line, replacing the drive then re-silvering? Is there a more effective way to do this?
Q5: Aside from moving my jails on to remote servers (VMware) and connecting via iSCSI, any better ideas for a solution.
This box is not a commercial box, this is strictly for my own personal use (clearly an expensive but rewarding hobby).