New FreeNAS Build

[Chris Moore]

For the sake of compatibility and reliability over the long term, I would suggest going with something like this.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-H310-...e-SATA-cables-ZFS-FreeNAS-unRAID/322865731521
Connect all your storage drives to it and connect the boot drives to the SATA ports built into the system board.
Pretty much guaranteed to work problem free.

Edit. After reading the eBay listing more carefully, I see that it has an older BIOS / firmware and it would need to be updated.

 

[LIGISTX]

For the sake of compatibility and reliability over the long term, I would suggest going with something like this.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-H310-...e-SATA-cables-ZFS-FreeNAS-unRAID/322865731521
Connect all your storage drives to it and connect the boot drives to the SATA ports built into the system board.
Pretty much guaranteed to work problem free.

If I plan to run 9 drives in my array, I should just connect one of the final drives to the motherboard controller? I am doing 4tbx9 in Z2.


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[Chris Moore]

If I plan to run 9 drives in my array, I should just connect one of the final drives to the motherboard controller? I am doing 4tbx9 in Z2.
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Yes, that will work fine. FreeNAS doesn't discriminate about which drive is connected where as long as it has a working data path to the drive. You could actually shut the system down, shuffle the drives like a deck of cards, put them back in, boot it back up and as long as FreeNAS can find the drive, it will all just work. That is also a feature that allows you to move an existing pool to new hardware without any problems.

 

[LIGISTX]

Yes, that will work fine. FreeNAS doesn't discriminate about which drive is connected where as long as it has a working data path to the drive. You could actually shut the system down, shuffle the drives like a deck of cards, put them back in, boot it back up and as long as FreeNAS can find the drive, it will all just work. That is also a feature that allows you to move an existing pool to new hardware without any problems.

Yea, I guess I inherently knew that answer. Just wanted to double check. Now the next question would be balancing the controllers. I know this probably doesn’t matter at all, but should I do, say, 3 drives per sas controller, and the three drives in the onboard controller? Or is this just was over thinking the issue?


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[Chris Moore]

Yea, I guess I inherently knew that answer. Just wanted to double check. Now the next question would be balancing the controllers. I know this probably doesn’t matter at all, but should I do, say, 3 drives per sas controller, and the three drives in the onboard controller? Or is this just was over thinking the issue?

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Not at all. That SAS controller (using SAS expanders) can handle upwards of 100 drives with no trouble at all.

 

[CraigD]

I know the IO Crest card in my signature works

Have Fun

 

[LIGISTX]

Or

For the sake of compatibility and reliability over the long term, I would suggest going with something like this.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-H310-...e-SATA-cables-ZFS-FreeNAS-unRAID/322865731521
Connect all your storage drives to it and connect the boot drives to the SATA ports built into the system board.
Pretty much guaranteed to work problem free.

Edit. After reading the eBay listing more carefully, I see that it has an older BIOS / firmware and it would need to be updated.

Ordered, I may need some help flashing that bad boy once it shows up.

 

[LIGISTX]

I know this is a really horrible idea, trust me its not intended to be used for when I deploy, but my 16 GB of RAM won't be in for a few weeks apparently. Can I even run FreeNAS on 4 GB of RAM just to burn in the disks? Even if its slow, I am waiting for that ram anyways...

 

[Chris Moore]

I know this is a really horrible idea, trust me its not intended to be used for when I deploy, but my 16 GB of RAM won't be in for a few weeks apparently. Can I even run freenas on 4 GB of RAM just to burn in the disks? Even if its slow, I am waiting for that ram anyways...

Just for burning in your discs, that'll be fine. The reason for having all that memory is to make the NAS perform properly, but you're not really using it as a NAS when you're just burning in the drives.

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[LIGISTX]

Just for burning in your discs, that'll be fine. The reason for having all that memory is to make the NAS perform properly, but you're not really using it as a NAS when you're just burning in the drives.

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Sweet, thanks. I just wasn’t sure if it would even instal and boot with only 4GB at this day and age.


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[LIGISTX]

Ok, well my RAM order from tiger direct was all but canceled by them. They are out of stock, can't get more, no clue when more will come, and are telling me price will likely change. To make it more fun, I can't find CT8G4WFS824A anywhere. The entire world is sold out from what I can tell.

Anyone have a recomendation? Can't do SH|T without more RAM, the 4 GB the proliant came with won't go very far lol.

Never-mind, found this... https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CX4UX4S/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

[LIGISTX]

Thoughts on enabling Encryption when I create my Volume? I am currently running SMART Long, will then do badblocks ect ect. Just getting things ready in my brain.

The CPU has AES-NI, I assume from past research I shouldn't take much performance hit due to this?

 

[Chris Moore]

Thoughts on enabling Encryption when I create my Volume? I am currently running SMART Long, will then do badblocks ect ect. Just getting things ready in my brain.

Unless there is a regulation requiring encryption, you should avoid it. There is a good possibility of losing all your data if any little thing goes wrong.

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[Ericloewe]

Thoughts on enabling Encryption when I create my Volume?

How do you feel about philosophical discussions about whether encrypted data still exists if you lose they key?

 

[LIGISTX]

How do you feel about philosophical discussions about whether encrypted data still exists if you lose they key?

I mean, I wouldn't lose the key lol. But I guess if its just a pain/has possibility to go wrong, its not really worth it.

Losing the key is definitely not the issue.

 

[Chris Moore]

Losing the key is definitely not the issue.

The thing I recently saw was a situation where the key didn't work. Now, it was a bit of a perfect storm. The person had a boot pool failure so they needed to replace the boot media and re-install and they didn't have a recent backup of their config file or the encryption key.
The reason it is discouraged is because of the possibility that something can go catastrophically wrong and then your data is just gone.
Now, if you want to do it, be very cautious about it. Take great care and make backups of your data so that if your primary storage does go, you are only inconvenienced.
This is not something to enter into lightly.

 

[BigDave]

@LIGISTX
Use the forum search and type this in the window;
encryption FreeNAS failed
today's it's showing 380 results, that's a lot to read through but I can tell you there are three major "things that go wrong" using encryption with FreeNAS are;

• Importing encrypted pool after boot drive failure and re-installation of OS.
• Updating from older versions of FreeNAS to current STABLE version.
• Bad; Karma/Ying&Yang/Ch'i and of course SEUs

:D

 

[Svengal]

To be honest I skimmed through this thread and am not sure where you ended up - if you're building based on the list of parts in your OP or if you ended up using the proliant ml10 gen9 server you mentioned. So maybe this is NA but I think the Kaby Lake i3-7100 should might work. It provides may provide ECC support and AES-NI. Of course you'd need BIOS 2.x on the X11SSM-F.

As a disclaimer, I should mention I have no idea what I'm talking about (I have a noob hardware post just a few doors down) so if you've read something that steers you away from the i3-7100...

EDIT: In reply to my noob Will it FreeNAS post, Ericloewe said the i3-7100 "is something of a risk. Besides needing the 2.0 BIOS, it was originally listed as not supporting ECC. That has since been changed, but the sour taste stayed behind."

...
I have gone through the new hardware recommendation thread and think I have my bearings with the new Skylake chips (avoiding Kaby since I plan on an i3).

I am planning to use Seagate Ironwolf 4 TB's, 8 of them to be exact in Z2, should provide a touch over 21 TB of formatted space.

i3-6100
MBD-X11SSM-F-O
SeaSonic G Series SSR-550RM 550W
M391A2K43BB1-CPB (16 GB ECC RAM)
Likely a Fractal R5 with intake fans for the HDD's


I guess my real question here is, how effective would the i3-6100 be. ...

 

[LIGISTX]

To be honest I skimmed through this thread and am not sure where you ended up - if you're building based on the list of parts in your OP or if you ended up using the proliant ml10 gen9 server you mentioned. So maybe this is NA but I think the Kaby Lake i3-7100 should might work. It provides may provide ECC support and AES-NI. Of course you'd need BIOS 2.x on the X11SSM-F.

As a disclaimer, I should mention I have no idea what I'm talking about (I have a noob hardware post just a few doors down) so if you've read something that steers you away from the i3-7100...

EDIT: In reply to my noob Will it FreeNAS post, Ericloewe said the i3-7100 "is something of a risk. Besides needing the 2.0 BIOS, it was originally listed as not supporting ECC. That has since been changed, but the sour taste stayed behind."

Went with the proliant. Working well so far.


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[LIGISTX]

So, the Intel ME vulnerability dealio. According to this, my box is not affected, which is somewhat confusing to me as I thought all Intel chips, Xeon or not, of this gen are affected. I know there is a few more things than just the chip itself, but I figured HPE would be using similar motherboards for my box vs some of these others. I could be wrong obviously, but just wondering if anyone else has any contradictory info.

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-hpesbhf03754en_us