My First Volume. Not sure if ok...

[djsticky]

Hi Guys,

I just finished building my box and booted up FreeNas (8.3.0) for the first time in my life. Accessed the GUI and I went over the basic configuration. The time has come to create my volume.
I created a Raid Z2 volume out of 6 x 3TB Drives. I made sure I selected all 6 drives when creating it. The volume now reports a size of 10.7 TiB.
Shouldn't it be closer to 12TB of usable space? Im starting to doubt that i might have done something wrong.
Any ideas? Thanks.

 

[bollar]

10.7 TiB is about 11.7 TB, so you're close. Disks are measured in 1000s, while everything else computer related is 1024s.

Wikipedia - Tebibyte

 

[bollar]

BTW, if you didn't force 4k blocks, I'd go back and destroy and rebuild the array now. This will future-proof your array if you buy disks that don't support 512k blocks in the future.

 

[djsticky]

Ok, doing that right now. Detaching my volume, marking disks as new.
I will recreate it and force the 4k blocks.
What would be my next step once I'm done?
If I get this correctly, the volume is a Vdev, right? Do I have to worry about Zpools now or can I start creating my shares and users?

 

[bollar]

When you create your first volume, the system creates a zpool and the first vdev, so yes, you can go about setting up your system. However, I'd suggest that you play with it first, just to make sure that you're happy with the configuration -- not that there's anything wrong with the configuration you've chosen, but there are some things that are difficult to change once you have data on it (like the 4K blocks). And there's always the chance of doing something destructive by accident when you're new... ;)

 

[djsticky]

You're absolutely right. I'm afraid to go forward, I've been watching Youtube videos for the past hour... lol.
My goal is not really complicated though. It's basically a media server for Movies, MP3s, Family Photos, etc...
Will be using XBMC boxes to scan the media and play them on my TVs.
I'd like to install SabNZBd and Transmission on it as well so I've been watching the plugin videos as well.
I kind of get it but afraid to go forward. I'll take everything a step at a time, and make sure everything is right before I copy over my existing data.

Speaking of copying over existing data, will I be able to plug in my ext4 formatted USB HD and start copying?

 

[bollar]

No, EXT4 isn't supported in FreeNAS. You'll need to connect the drive to one of your PCs and copy it across that way, preferably with a method that verifies that the data has been copied completely and correctly. It's been a long time since I've messed with Windows machines in depth, so I don't have any specific recommendations on how to go about that.

Don't lose the family pictures, unless you and the NAS want to live in the dog house... ;)

 

[djsticky]

Haha. Good point. Ok so I'll do it using my Ubuntu box over the network.
I'll then use my 2TB external USB drive for backups of my photos.

Now, how to organize my folders.
A) Do I just share the volume and make folders under it?
B) Do I make datasets for each type of media (Movies, Photos, etc...) and then another dataset for downloads done by plugins via mountpoints?
C) When using my laptop, can I move files from one dataset share (Ex: Downloads) to another dataset share (Ex: Movies)? Will this be copied/moved locally on the NAS or will it go through my network?

 

[jgreco]

A) You can do that if you wish.

B) You can do that if you wish. Don't know anything about FreeNAS plugins though.

C) If you do A), there's just one share, so things are moved directly. If you do B), it's traversing a mount point, and so it'll be copied over the network both ways.

 

[djsticky]

Ok, I ended up creating 1 storage volume with 2 datasets.
1 for Media (Movies, TV Shows, Music and Downloads)
2 for Family (Photos, Home Movies, etc..)

I changed the permissions on the volume so that my user "djstiky" and a group called "admin" is the owner. djsticky is a member of the admin group.
Same permissions for the Media dataset
And for the Family dataset, My user is the owner but I made a group called family and set that as the group so that my family members can add photos as well. All users in my family are members of the family group.

My question is, will I break any of the system services by not using "root" as the owner and "wheel" as the group on one or any of those 3?

 

[JaimieV]

Nope, that's all good.

You might find that the extra users are unnecessary, and become a mild annoyance after a while. For domestic stuff I tend to stick to just one user+pass for all the public shares, makes things that much simpler. But your setup is the "right" way, inasmuch as there is a right way! Good work.