New Adopter Any Day Now

[Lady Gaia]

I've been following ZFS development for many years and am very much looking forward to getting FreeNAS up and running at home. We currently have an aging FireWire attached RAID solution that needs to be retired, and a new FreeNAS Mini that has had a fairly fundamental issue out of the box (won't recognize any disks, working with ixSystems to resolve the problem.) So I'll be there soon, but not just yet.

I come from a strong technical background with experience in a variety of UNIX flavors so I expect to be up to speed quickly. This seems like the perfect application of what open source does well and it looks like a great community. I expect I'll shy away from the bleeding edge since it'll be housing real data we care about .. but you never know. I might be tempted to tinker with early builds in a virtual machine as well.

 

[gpsguy]

Welcome to the forums!

 

[FlippedBit]

Probably not related since you said none of the drives are recognized (I'm assuming that neither the Intel or the Marvell ports are working), but just in case:

http://forums.tweaktown.com/asrock/56191-c2750d4i-marvel-9230-sata-port-problems-2.html

A lot of people also seem to recommend either an IBM ServeRaid M1015 or LSI 9211 expansion card, flashed so as to disable any RAID functions. Some more on that:

https://www.reddit.com/r/freenas/comments/357fa2/does_freenas_support_addin_sata_cards/
http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/
http://brycv.com/blog/2012/flashing-it-firmware-to-lsi-sas9211-8i/

(I'm a newbie... just sharing what I uncovered recently)

 

[m0nkey_]

Probably not related since you said none of the drives are recognized (I'm assuming that neither the Intel or the Marvell ports are working), but just in case:

http://forums.tweaktown.com/asrock/56191-c2750d4i-marvel-9230-sata-port-problems-2.html

A lot of people also seem to recommend either an IBM ServeRaid M1015 or LSI 9211 expansion card, flashed so as to disable any RAID functions. Some more on that:

https://www.reddit.com/r/freenas/comments/357fa2/does_freenas_support_addin_sata_cards/
http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/
http://brycv.com/blog/2012/flashing-it-firmware-to-lsi-sas9211-8i/

(I'm a newbie... just sharing what I uncovered recently)

Ah yes, I remember the thread. It is a FreeNAS Mini, official hardware sold and shipped by iX Systems. @Lady Gaia did you get a response from iX or did you end up doing a RMA?

 

[Lady Gaia]

I've been exchanging messages routinely with iXsystems support. They've asked for some diagnostic data and requested that I open the unit to check for loose cables. Everything looks like it's seated snugly so I'm going to drop the system off for them to investigate further (it turns out their offices aren't all that far from my daily commute route.)

I debated simply exchanging it through Amazon for a new one but their correspondence so far has been extremely aboveboard and reassuring. Might as well give them a chance to investigate.

 

[Lady Gaia]

... and everything is up and running normally. I'm starting to migrate existing data to the new AFP share and my wife's MacBook is establishing its initial Time Machine backup. Daily and monthly snapshots have been scheduled, so I'm starting to feel more or less at home.

 

[FlippedBit]

Can you share what the issue was? I am thinking about picking up a FreeNAS mini or XL at some point, or building one with the same/similar hardware (Avoton C2750 SoC). Hoping to avoid problems like this, or at least expect them and know what to do.

 

[Lady Gaia]

I wish I could say for certain. I turned it over to one of their techs who looked everything over and had no trouble bringing it up, but I wasn't present to see what he did. He claimed that a particular strategy was required to properly insert drives into the backplane and demonstrated it. If they're really that finicky, the process should really be covered in the quick start manual included with the unit beyond the glib phrase "insert them into the drive bays."

 

[Lady Gaia]

Just checking in. I migrated everything off an existing HFS+ array over the course of a few days and have been generally really happy with the FreeNAS Mini on the current 9.10 release. Even configured for maximum data security allowing for two drive failures I was getting impressive throughput. Via rsync I was getting close to maxing out the gigabit Ethernet connection and seeing a sustained transfer speed over 56MB/sec. Nice.

Of course ZFS was the real draw and I love having nightly snapshots that expire in a month alongside monthly snapshots that last a year. Setting everything up was painless and I'm getting reasonably handy with the zfs command. It's basically everything I was hoping for aside from some minor quirks I'll try to document in more detail (filesystem disagreements on handling of Unicode and the less-than-stellar experience of importing a USB thumb drive leap to mind.)

I even got curious and installed a FreeNAS 10 nightly build in a VM to see what was coming down the road. I like what I see but plan to be rather conservative about actually migrating.

 

[m0nkey_]

@Lady Gaia Awesome! Good to know it's working out for you. Welcome!

 

[Mirfster]

Welcome and nice posting.