Newbie

[crash]

Hey guys!
Hoping to learn a lot from these forums. I've been having a bunch of issues with FreeNAS but I wanted to jump on here and get some advice from people much wiser than myself before calling it quits with FreeNAS. I had been wanting a NAS for a while and have been using my Raspberry Pi for Samba shares and such, but once I saw FreeNAS it seemed heaven sent. Had a lot of issues trying to install it at first, but eventually got it working on FreeNAS-9 and upgraded within the UI to Corral. I absolutely LOVE the interface on Corral and all the options it gives, but its been giving me a fair amount of grief (currently looking at a "this site can't be reached page" trying to locally access the UI after an update to 10.3, just happened though so haven't delved deep into fixing it yet).

I guess a good question to start out with is about my hardware. I had an older computer that my girlfriend's mom gave me. Decent machine. It has:

AMD Athlon II X4 640 Quad Core CPU
Biostar A770E3 motherboard
16GB RAM (upgraded from 8 for the FreeNAS)
5X 4TB WD Red NAS Drives
1 Sandisk Cruzer USB Flash (For OS)

So when I installed FreeNAS9 on there, I only had 3 of the WD drives and 8GB of ram, but I created a volume, made a smb share, and started transferring all the movie files I had on my Raspberry Pi to it just as a test, somewhat slow transfers (9-10Mbps) but not terribly concerned about that. Took a while but everything transferred over successfully, no issues. Then I upgraded to Corral. It was giving me issues trying to do fresh install of Corral but updating from the UI seemed to work fine.

Decided to up the hardware a bit and got 2 more drives and 16GB of ram. Among other issues, Tried to do another large transfer and this gave me my main issue, it crashes after about 15-20GB into the transfer. I can see the ram start to steadily increase while doing the transfer though, and from what I read on similar problems in the forum, this is sort of "expected" from a ZFS setup? That's sort of crazy to me though, and I don't want to drop 1-$200 more on ram for a system that was ultimately supposed to save me from dropping a grand on a QNAP NAS or something similar.

This thread seemed to be talking about a similar issue:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-crashing-on-heavy-data-transfers.41851/

I do have a HP Proliant G6 Server (2X Quad E5540 Xeon, 32GB Ram, etc, etc) that I use for Plex, VMs, and all kinds of stuff and the ram for that is dirt cheap, like 10 bucks for 4GB. So I thought about just getting a 5 bay SATA enclosure for the WD disks, plugging that into the server, and running FreeNAS from that instead. With all the issues I've had thus far with FreeNAS though I'm just not entirely sure if it would be a good idea to migrate the OS to the server now. So I guess my questions are:

1.) Is a Hard Drive enclosure like this (https://www.amazon.com/ORICO-9558RU...ts=p_n_feature_keywords_browse-bin:2886974011) Good for using with FreeNAS VM on my server? Any possible complications or downsides?

2.) Does the HP server seem like the better option to use with FreeNAS?

3.) (Shot in the dark) Any ideas about the crashes on large transfers? Ram likely the culprit?

Thanks for any help in advance, looking forward to cruising the forum regularly and hopefully get this thing up and running/ pass down the knowledge to someone else.

 

[JoshDW19]

Welcome to the forums @crash!

 

[droeders]

For the record, this post should probably be in "Will it FreeNAS?" or somewhere under "Help and Support".

Also, from the sounds of it, you should probably do some more reading on FreeNAS, recommended hardware, ZFS basics, etc. Lots of good stuff in the forum on this.

I guess a good question to start out with is about my hardware. I had an older computer that my girlfriend's mom gave me. Decent machine. It has:

AMD Athlon II X4 640 Quad Core CPU
Biostar A770E3 motherboard
16GB RAM (upgraded from 8 for the FreeNAS)
5X 4TB WD Red NAS Drives
1 Sandisk Cruzer USB Flash (For OS)

Definitely not recommended hardware for FreeNAS (aside from the drives).

Then I upgraded to Corral. It was giving me issues trying to do fresh install of Corral but updating from the UI seemed to work fine.

Corral is not ready for production yet. Unless you're into software testing, I would revert to 9.10.

I can see the ram start to steadily increase while doing the transfer though, and from what I read on similar problems in the forum, this is sort of "expected" from a ZFS setup?

Yes - ZFS will typically use as much RAM as it can for the ARC.

That's sort of crazy to me though, and I don't want to drop 1-$200 more on ram for a system that was ultimately supposed to save me from dropping a grand on a QNAP NAS or something similar.

Don't waste any more money on this AMD system for FreeNAS.

I do have a HP Proliant G6 Server (2X Quad E5540 Xeon, 32GB Ram, etc, etc) that I use for Plex, VMs, and all kinds of stuff and the ram for that is dirt cheap, like 10 bucks for 4GB.

Yes - use this instead. Sounds like it has ECC RAM, which is highly recommended. 32GB of ECC RAM will be more than sufficient for FreeNAS.

So I thought about just getting a 5 bay SATA enclosure for the WD disks, plugging that into the server, and running FreeNAS from that instead. With all the issues I've had thus far with FreeNAS though I'm just not entirely sure if it would be a good idea to migrate the OS to the server now. So I guess my questions are:

1.) Is a Hard Drive enclosure like this (https://www.amazon.com/ORICO-9558RU3-Enclosure-Connection-Aluminum/dp/B00WHMT604/ref=sr_1_4?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1491925166&sr=1-4&refinements=p_n_feature_keywords_browse-bin:2886974011) Good for using with FreeNAS VM on my server? Any possible complications or downsides?

A definitive NO to any external SATA enclosures unless it has a SAS connection to the host (and there are some pitfalls here as well). Either move to a case that supports your number of drives or look into an external SAS enclosure.

2.) Does the HP server seem like the better option to use with FreeNAS?

3.) (Shot in the dark) Any ideas about the crashes on large transfers? Ram likely the culprit?

Thanks for any help in advance, looking forward to cruising the forum regularly and hopefully get this thing up and running/ pass down the knowledge to someone else.

Yes - the HP seems like a much better option.

No idea - could be many things, including the Corral version of FreeNAS.

My recommendation: do some more homework and forum reading, then migrate to the HP server for FreeNAS 9.10.