New user, need guidance

[bigunk]

Okay, so I'm really a newbie here. I have built a couple of samba servers in my time and they worked well, but I wasn't able (read smart enough) to get all my drives as one array, so I eventually went with a Drobo that worked very well (for me, using BeyondRAID) and needed little effort on my part. Well Windows decided to depricate SMBv1 that Drobo uses (security issues), and Drobo Inc. has gone away, thus it's a paper weight. So now I'm back to square one. I did set up my machine with 5ea 4TB drives and a small boot drive. Cool. I followed directions and created a pool and a couple of shares (still noob-level stuff in my book). Nice. Now here's where I get confused: 5 drives with roughly 4TB each should be just shy of 20TB. When Raid of some type (like5) is set up, I would think I lose a disk for parity, and I should have about 16TB left. I only see 10TB. So either I'm doing something wrong, or I'm doing something wrong. Choose. Is there some trick I missed that will allow the capacity to show as I want it to, yet still have some safety (I'll be running backups to external drives, so extreme safety is not an issue). If I'm reading things the right way, TrueNAS does some kind of mirroring by default. Not sure if that's what I want. Anyone got thoughts and guidance on this? Hopefully you won't send me to exhaustive levels of fall-asleep documentation.

 

[Arwen]

First off, this should be a separate thread. I've made the request to Moderators to move it.

Next, without clear wording we can only guess that you used RAID-Z1, you said "When Raid of some type (like5) is set up". The real test is show us what the output of the commands below is, in CODE tags;
zpool list -v zpool status

Last, listing your complete hardware can let us help you further. On occasion, a new user makes a poor choice in hardware that can impact performance or reliability. Knowing that in advance is helpful, even if you can't, (afford to), change it.

 

[bigunk]

Asus P5Q SE motherboard (this was one of my old Samba machines before I went with the Drobo
4 Western red drives 4TB ea.
1 Hitachi 4 TB drive
1 Toshiba 160G laptop drive for booting
4GB RAM (I can up it if need be but it worked fine when this was my Samba machine).

I ran the two commands from the console and It showed Raid -z2. So I destroyed the pool and went to create another. After squinting my eyes and looking around, I found the pool type setting and created a raid-z, where the default is raid-z2. The available space is now ~14.5TB, so I'm happy for the moment. I'm planning on building a new machine, so consider this one as proof of concept for me. I'm going to give this a run and see how it performs. I know it won't be a speed demon, but that's not what I need at this time. Thank you for your time and I'm always open for suggestions that can help me learn.

Len

 

[bigunk]

Asus P5Q SE motherboard (this was one of my old Samba machines before I went with the Drobo
4 Western red drives 4TB ea.
1 Hitachi 4 TB drive
1 Toshiba 160G laptop drive for booting
4GB RAM (I can up it if need be but it worked fine when this was my Samba machine).

I ran the two commands from the console and It showed Raid -z2. So I destroyed the pool and went to create another. After squinting my eyes and looking around, I found the pool type setting and created a raid-z, where the default is raid-z2. The available space is now ~14.5TB, so I'm happy for the moment. I'm planning on building a new machine, so consider this one as proof of concept for me. I'm going to give this a run and see how it performs. I know it won't be a speed demon, but that's not what I need at this time. Thank you for your time and I'm always open for suggestions that can help me learn.

Len

Uh oh. Now I've created some shares, but I don't know where to give them name and password credentials or have them visible from my windows machine. Strange,. because I did it when this was a raid-z2 setup. My guess is it's not the raid type, but my memory of what I did. I think I can figure it out, but any help would be much appreciated.

 

[Jailer]

4GB RAM

That's a problem. The minimum required RAM is 8GB and it is strongly suggested that you have 16GB.

 

[Arwen]

Great, we have the explanation for the size difference, RAID-Z2 verses RAID-Z1.

...
4 Western red drives 4TB ea.
...

You might want to check the model of those WD Red 4TB drives. New ones, (for the last few years), are using SMR, (Shingled Magnetic Recording), technology. This is problematic for ZFS. If it works, (and the WD Red SMRs generally don't work well with ZFS), they are slower than CMR / PMR, (Conventional / Perpendicular Magnetic Recording).

And yes, 8GBs of RAM is really the minimum. We have found that too little RAM, (even as low as 6GBs), can lead to unreliability in your TrueNAS server.

Sorry, I can't help with Samba user names & passwords.

 

[bigunk]

That's a problem. The minimum required RAM is 8GB and it is strongly suggested that you have 16GB.

Would not enough RAM cause me to not be able to map to a share? It was working just a couple days ago with raid-z2.

 

[Jailer]

Would not enough RAM cause me to not be able to map to a share? It was working just a couple days ago with raid-z2.

Not enough RAM causes a lot of strange behaviors to occur.

 

[bigunk]

Not enough RAM causes a lot of strange behaviors to occur.

Then I'll get more.