New FreeNAS Server...need opinions please.

[SCORPION]

I was thinking of building a FreeNAS Server using the following:

AsRock E3C226D2I supports 16gb

CPU
Core i7 i7-4790S(C0) 4 core/ 8 Hyperthread Haswell-R 3.2GHz 8MB 65W P2.00 Supports AES-NI

Memory
DDR3 1600 ECC 8GB ADATA ADDE1600W8G11-BMID 10331054 Micron

Drives
WD Drives 2TB WD Gold High-Capacity Datacenter Hard Drive 128 MB Cache 3.5" Internal

Case: I do not know yet i am doing research on that.

Can anyone give me a true assessment of this system to build.

I am also looking at the asRock
C2750D4I

As my alternative


Thank You.

 

[m0nkey_]

The Haswell Core i7 does not support ECC. Only Pentium, Core i3 and E3-Xeon are officially supported in the ASRock Rack E3C226D2I. Source: I own the C224 variant.

 

[saikee]

New FeeNas user here.

Built two systems using existing equipment last week. None supports ECC. Found FreeNAS uses all the rams when they are available. Forum users seem to think 16GB can make the system happy. Mine have 12GB and 32GB. Not suggesting deviation from ECC ram just indicating one makes do with what one got.

My test system has a i7-920 on a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5P mobo with 12GB 1333MHz ram with 3x2TB hdd in stripe. That runs very well.

My bigger system is having problem that remote users found unavailable in Plex possibly because having too much data, about 17TB data in a 2x3x8TB mirror. It has a i7-3770K CPU, 32GB 1866MHz ram on a Asus Sabertooth Z77 mobo.

Both systems run faultless as NAS. My problem could be the limited Internet bandwidth and a heavy top end, thousands of movies, photos and videos, with the plugin Plex.

Personally I think FreeNAS is pretty easy to set up. The zpool is a bit confusing at first and the worst part is no hard disk can be withdraw, possible to replace in some set ups, once a Vdev has been set up. Make sure one has back ups for the valuable data. I have to reconfigure the zpool three times and it took days to transfer the data back using Samba about 60MB/s. Internal transfer inside the Freenas between hard disk is about 120MB/s and the current version 9.10 can import ntfs disk directly.

I would go with the mirror setup as it is possibly the most flexible if not the best for the new users.

Also I would recommend using mobile racks that can accept quickly bare hard disks without any tooth and pay attention to the hardware requirement if you intend to do hot swap with hard disks.

 

[nightshade00013]

Your i7 is a big no go as stated.

I would honestly find another board if you have any thoughts of using Plex or other jails. 16GB of ram will be fine for a NAS but once you throw Plex and some other stuff at it you will start using more memory and then wonder why everything seems to slow down. For FreeNAS in general the more memory the better and this is especially true if you will use something like Plex.

The Avoton embedded boards are having some failures. https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...s-system-fault-may-lead-to-dead-system.50314/ Some of the ASrock Avoton boards are dropping dead after just over a year and who knows what can happen to your data when that happens. Not to mention downtime, troubleshooting, waiting for a RMA if it's still within warranty or plain being out 400 bucks. A lot of people are running Supermicro boards and honestly in a situation where you want something stable for the long run there is no need to try and reinvent the wheel. If you are fine with older used hardware it's easy to find a decommissioned server that will more than fit your needs. All you really need to think about is what you want to do with it and storage space requirements, then add drives. Anything Intel from the E5500 series and newer should fit the bill. The tradeoff is that the older hardware will use more power, my Dual E5640 uses around 180 watts at idle (system running with no active streams around 5% cpu usage). If you want to see the specs scroll down for the info in my signature. Newer hardware will have a better idle power consumption, an E5-2600 v3 will idle closer to 100 watts. It's not huge but I waste around 700KWH per year or about 63 dollars a year in extra power over a newer server.

Drop the Gold drives and just get WD Red Nas drives, the extra money will not be worth it unless you have datacenter needs. I don't see where Mirror's can be any better than a RaidZ2 pool. Mirror's are always a 50% redundancy and with multiple mirrored vDev's in a pool you always have a single disk ure risk when rebuilding and lose the entire pool. Mirror's are generally used when you have lots of VM's and need the fast raw disk speed. I would suggest starting off with a 6 to 8 drive RaidZ2 or 7 to 9 drive RaidZ3. A RaidZ2 allows you to have any two disks in a vDev fail and not lose the pool and a RaidZ3 allows any three disks to fail in the same situation. My 7 X 4TB drive RaidZ3 is more than capable of reads around 500MBps and can stream multiple movies at the same time without breaking a sweat.

I agree that a rackmount case is great and for an Extended ATX board the more common choice. However do not hot swap your drives, plan to do an orderly shutdown after marking the drive for removal if something needs to be done. Treat your data like you would treat your firstborn two day old and everything will be fine, toss it around like a redheaded step child and you may not be happy about what happens. If you have questions ask them and read the forum stickies and look for suggested info in the signature lines of the people who have done this for a while.

 

[saikee]

There is a rule of thumb of 1GB ram for 1TB storage. The i7-720 mobo is really old and the limit is 24GB for its 6 slots which is now fully populated with 12GB. It is a test machine and seem to be running merrily with 6TB storage.

I know I am taking risk by using used desktop hardware to run a home NAS server but my data is just replaceable media files which I have enough backup should I lose the pool. Admittedly it takes time to rebuild the pool but I rather like to see how the hardware fail first before spending money on commercial grade hardware.

I shall keep an eye on my two systems and report any misbehavior.

The fast Raidz read doesn't do much good to me at the moment because when I rebuild the pool the reading speed from the source is limited by the internal bus speed of a single disk (in ntfs format which I could mount on the FreeNAS) which is about 120MB/s. If I do it from machine to machine via Samba using nic the megabit card can only do 500MB/s on average and that is about 60MB/s write speed I have achieved. Mathematically data from a 4TB still need 18 hours to write on my new pool no matter how fast is the Raidz as the bottle neck is at the reading process of the source.

This is early days for FreeNAS for me but I believe if I keep my source in vdev off line and re-admit them internally when filling my new zpool I could shorten the data transfer significantly.

 

[nightshade00013]

There should be minimal reason to continually have to rebuild a pool unless there are issues with something crashing or being incorrectly done. Up and running here for over a year and zero rebuilds.

But you have already said you value money over stability and safety so we can leave it at that. For the OP read the recommended threads and learn from others mistakes or potential mistakes.

 

[saikee]

I rebuilt the zpool because I was inexperienced with its working.

For example the GUI Guide states "RAIDZ1: requires at least three disks". This makes me think perhaps I could use 4 disks with with capacity of 3 and one for redundancy overhead. However FreeNAS GUI does Raidz1 with only 3 disks with capacity of 2. In a 4 disks format the 4th disk has to be a spare or stripe.

Another example is when I submitted 6 disks to FreeNAS GUI and selected mirror, thinking I could have 3 disks capacity with the remaining 3 to mirror the first three, FreeNAS arranged one disk capacity with remaining 5 as identical mirrors to the first single disk. One can get round it by staged submission but reading the guide alone is not enough to find out the inner working of zpool. I made some mistakes so ended up a couple trials before finding my optimized arrangement.

One thing I did find out is that the ZFS pool is a real gem. Last night I copied some data from the pool to a single 8TB disk as a backup expecting the transfer rate would be the normal bus speed of 120MB/s. I actually got about 200MB/s gradually reducing to 150MB/s as the disk was being written from the outer tracks to the inner tracks (outer tracks faster for having longer circumference at the constant 5400rpm). I was expecting the read speed of each of the 3 disks from my 3x8TB mirror to 1/3 but it was 1/6 of the write speed for all 6 disks. This is new to me as Windows system can't read twice as fast than write in a mirror set up. Reading the Internet information confirms that this ability is indeed one of the great features of FreeNAS. ZFS is capable of making every working disk to contribute differently and evenly to satisfy a read demand call even for a mirror pool.