Hi Everyone,
I'm new to FreeNAS and would just like so say how impressed I am with it. I've undertaken a project that required a large amount of storage with minimal costs. It has to be as reliable as possible within the budget. Speed not an issue as its for online backups so only needs to be as fast as crappy ADSL internet upload speeds.
What I ended up with is a pretty basic pc in a big box with 20HDDs.
entry level ASUS mainboard, intel G620 processor. (old stock at work) 8GB RAM.
Running 2x 2 port SATAII pci-e controller cards (sil-something chipset)
each of those has 2x 5 port mulitipliers hanging off them.
fully populated with 20x 3TB Hitachi HDDs.
Of course theres a rather beefy power supply running the whole lot.
Case wise it was originally going into a Norco 20bay rack unit for the benefits of the full backplane and space saving of it being rackmount but due to difficulty in aquiring the case (3+ month wait time) we ended up with a Lian-Li PC-D8000.
No backplane or anything with this case and its big enough to be a coffee table so space wise its less than ideal but it is a good quality case with decent cooling. Also its almost dead quiet even with 20 HDDs spinning.
FreeNAS 8.3.0 booting off a USB drive I've configured the drives into 4x 5drive ZFS raidZ volumes. each on their own port multiplier. 1 & 2 on the first sata card and 3 & 4 of the 2nd. ive configured cron jobs to backup 1 to 3 and 4 to 2 while volumes 1 & 4 will be the deliverables via iSCSI. this way when the 2 iscsi targets are in use the load is shared across both sata controllers and each has a backup on the other controller.
The iscsi targets are served to a windows 7 virtual machine which hosts the backup software and are used as the storage targets for the cloud backup solution.
So far so good. system more than keeps up with the load sent to it, will see how it goes as more backups come online. (the seeding process for multi TB backups is a timely process fitting it around my current workload).
If anyone has any suggestions or can point out any issues with the above (im not 100% on the cron jobs for backup. how to make sure they're working etc apart from seeing the volumes fill up.)
I'm new to FreeNAS and would just like so say how impressed I am with it. I've undertaken a project that required a large amount of storage with minimal costs. It has to be as reliable as possible within the budget. Speed not an issue as its for online backups so only needs to be as fast as crappy ADSL internet upload speeds.
What I ended up with is a pretty basic pc in a big box with 20HDDs.
entry level ASUS mainboard, intel G620 processor. (old stock at work) 8GB RAM.
Running 2x 2 port SATAII pci-e controller cards (sil-something chipset)
each of those has 2x 5 port mulitipliers hanging off them.
fully populated with 20x 3TB Hitachi HDDs.
Of course theres a rather beefy power supply running the whole lot.
Case wise it was originally going into a Norco 20bay rack unit for the benefits of the full backplane and space saving of it being rackmount but due to difficulty in aquiring the case (3+ month wait time) we ended up with a Lian-Li PC-D8000.
No backplane or anything with this case and its big enough to be a coffee table so space wise its less than ideal but it is a good quality case with decent cooling. Also its almost dead quiet even with 20 HDDs spinning.
FreeNAS 8.3.0 booting off a USB drive I've configured the drives into 4x 5drive ZFS raidZ volumes. each on their own port multiplier. 1 & 2 on the first sata card and 3 & 4 of the 2nd. ive configured cron jobs to backup 1 to 3 and 4 to 2 while volumes 1 & 4 will be the deliverables via iSCSI. this way when the 2 iscsi targets are in use the load is shared across both sata controllers and each has a backup on the other controller.
The iscsi targets are served to a windows 7 virtual machine which hosts the backup software and are used as the storage targets for the cloud backup solution.
So far so good. system more than keeps up with the load sent to it, will see how it goes as more backups come online. (the seeding process for multi TB backups is a timely process fitting it around my current workload).
If anyone has any suggestions or can point out any issues with the above (im not 100% on the cron jobs for backup. how to make sure they're working etc apart from seeing the volumes fill up.)
