N00B Question: Setting up my first Pool and share

[linus12]

Hi all,
While I have a tone of PC experience, my Server experience has been kept to the software/OS side and virtually none on the hardware side. Anyway I have set up my system and installed FreeNAS 11.3. I have set my system to a static IP address outside of my Router's DHCP range and I can access the console there. (Turns out there is also a WebServer for the Motherboard as well, which confused the heck out of me at first! It also has been set to a static IP address!)

Anyway I went to set up my first Pool/dataset and it was complete disaster! While it seems to look OK, I could not access it from anywhere outside of the system. Not good for a file server!

Anyway I was wondering if there was a tutorial here that could walk me through setting up a "Share", accessible from multiple Windows 10 PRO systems? This share will contain, for the time being, approximately 6TB of Movies and 3TB of Music.

I'm looking for something that uses the correct FreeNAS terminology (pools, datasets, etc.) as well as required users, groups, permissions, etc. The documentation talks about this, but I can't quite see the forest for the trees.

Once this is setup, I'll add another set of disks/pool for setting up a plex server to allow other systems to access the movies as well; but I want to offload the movies from the various drives they are stored on now.

Even if this is handled in two or more documents/threads that's fine. I'm just looking for some N00B help.
Thanks in advance!
Linus

 

[Heracles]

Hey Linus,

Once this is setup, I'll add another set of disks/pool for setting up a plex server to allow other systems to access the movies as well

That would be a first No Go here... It is a million time better to design and build the pool at the beginning. You have much more flexibility that way and can also increase your security and redundancy.

Everything you described as a need here is sequential read. For that, a Raid-Z structure is what will serve you the best. Should you do 4 drives now and 2 drives later, you will end up with a RaidZ-1 and a mirror. It will give you 2 redundant drives, but it will not survive the loss of any 2 drives. Only 1 drive per vDev can fail. With these 6 drives from the beginning, you can do a single Raid-Z2 vDev and then survive the loss of any 2 drives.

It is possible to add drives in a pool or to create a separate pool, but it is never as good as doing it like that first time.

What you need to do for your share is :
--Create your pool
--Create a user account for accessing the NAS (i expect all your users will have the same access, so will share a single account...)
--Create a dataset and give ownership of that dataset to your newly created user account
--In Service, go to SMB and create the share there
--Allow access to your user
--From Windows, map that share using that user account
--Put the content you wish in that share

Good luck designing and configuring your server,

 

[G8One2]

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC for noobs!

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC and other newbie mistakes! I've put together a Powerpoint presentation(and PDF) that gives some useful info for newbies to FreeNAS. I decided to create this slideshow because in the last 5 months I've been on this forum I've seen a lot of people...

www.ixsystems.com

 

[linus12]

That would be a first No Go here... It is a million time better to design and build the pool at the beginning. You have much more flexibility that way and can also increase your security and redundancy.

A much as I would like to add another 6-12 drives to the system, at the moment it is just not possible.
The original pool I setup is using the 3 x 8TB drives in RAIDZ per the system (Netting about 14.3 TB usable) . My next "set" of drives will be another 3 x 8TB or 12TB NAS drives. also in RAIDZ. Whether they will be added into the existing pool or a new pool has yet to be decided. (Adding 12TB drives to the existing Pool would waste a lot of space, in that case I would set up a seperate pool.)
There are NO Mirrors in the system. The two SSDs are the boot drives, duplicated by FreeNAS during installation so that if one goes down the other one can be booted from!

My Goal is that while this will be a multi-purpose Server with Services and file access, file storage, I'm setting it up step by step; testing as I go along.

I will look into the steps you outlined.

 

[linus12]

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC for noobs!

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC and other newbie mistakes! I've put together a Powerpoint presentation(and PDF) that gives some useful info for newbies to FreeNAS. I decided to create this slideshow because in the last 5 months I've been on this forum I've seen a lot of people...

www.ixsystems.com

I'll look into this. Thank you!

 

[diedrichg]

Anyway I was wondering if there was a tutorial here that could walk me through setting up a "Share", accessible from multiple Windows 10 PRO systems?

Thanks in advance!
Linus

Uncle Fester's TrueNAS Beginner's Guide

User @UncleFester, some time ago, wrote a thorough beginner's guide for setup of FreeNAS 9.10. It seemed to me like something that belonged on a more permanent, and user-editable, location, so with his permission I wiki-fied the guide and have...

www.ixsystems.com

 

[blueether]

generally it's not recommended to do raidz1 on 'large' disks - do a search for the whys

From your first post I'm not quite sure what you wish to gain from the second set of drives?

If you do go down the route of 3 drives at a time and raidz1 you can add another vdev to the existing pool and only loose the 'parity' space for each vdev

 

[linus12]

generally it's not recommended to do raidz1 on 'large' disks - do a search for the whys

I added 3 drives to the VDev. FreeNAS only gave one option which it called ZRAID1. Are you saying I should scrap the whole process and wait until I can afford to add one more drive the VDev? Is there now a requirement for 4 drives as the minimum VDev? Is there some place in the documentation that indicates a minimum number of drives needed to create a VDev (assuming you don't want to just have JBOD? or mirrors?)

I was led to beleave that 3 drives would be fine, and that I could increase the pool size at a later time by adding more drives via an additional VDev.


My main goal at this point is to get large, rarely accessed, read-mostly files (Movies and Music) off of my personal PC and onto the server where they can be accessed by others. As explained above, my first set of drives is being added to hold my movies and music. They consist currently of about total of 6 TB and I still am only halfway through all my rips. Eventually I should be somewhere in the 15-20TB if I rip them all. So my current 3 drives will not quite hold everything, but after transferring the current rips to the server, I can free some space on one of my machines to at least continue ripping. Eventually, I will add additional drives a different VDev to increase the size of my "Media Pool" and there by freeing up the space again on my personal PC.

From your first post I'm not quite sure what you wish to gain from the second set of drives?

I a few months, I should be able to purchase 3 more drives. Those will be added to the server with the intent of setting up a "Storage Pool" for various members of the family to store files, rather than storing them all on their PC's (reducing their backup size and time to backup). Most likely those will be 12TB drives (assuming the price drops by then!)

Because I keep hearing that under certain circumstances you can loose a whole pool, it doesn't make sense to me to put everything under one pool when some files are read-mostly/rarely and other files are read/write often. Or am I just barking up the wrong tree and I should stop trying to examine how the files are used and just wait until I can afford more drives and then throw everything into a single large VDev/single Pool, letting the hardware just sit next to my desk doing nothing?

 

[blueether]

read the difference between vdev and pool. you can have many vdevs in a single pool, it looks like you may know this but some statements are a little hard to read when you seem to mix them.

You can do a 3 drive (raidz1) vdev in the pool and then add another 3 drive vdev latter - just be aware of the risks if raidz1 and resilver times and what will happen if a second drive develops errors during the time that you have no redundancy in the vdev. I would do a 6 drive raidz2 vdev myself but it is your choice.

one pool and several datasets makes better use of space, but you are correct that if you lose a vdev you lose the pool.

the choices you make now will effect what you can (easily) do latter to expand or how you can recover from lost disks