Noob Hardware build and experiences

[Mooja]

Hello All, I thought i'd post a hardware build i'm using with some success. I gleaned most of the pieces from various threads in this forum. I consider myself a typical home NAS user but I wasn't able to find exactly what I wanted from any one post in these forums and hope this info in one spot could help someone else.

What I wanted from the system:
- Limited redundancy. I lost some irreplaceable baby pictures and videos earlier this year using a netgear net drive. The thing only lasted 6 months before it failed. No backups. Much distress.
- Access to single mass storage from any device in the house. Streaming movies, music, pictures, home videos to various tv's, xbox's, receivers, computers, tablets, phones, etc.
- Lots of room from growth
- Low cost
- Some DIY satisfaction

Hardware:
2 x ($119.99) Western Digital WD Green WD30EZRX 3TB IntelliPower - OEM

$239.98​

​

2 x ($109.99) Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001 3TB 7200 RPM - OEM​

$219.98​

​

2 x ($100.00) Kingston 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR​

$200.00​

​

1 x ($109.99) AMD FX-4300 Vishera 3.8GHz (4.0GHz) Socket AM3+ 95​

$109.99​

​

1 x ($99.99) Fractal Design Define Mini Black Micro ATX Silent​

$99.99​

​

1 x ($64.99) SeaSonic SSP-450RT 450W ATX12V 80 PLUS GOLD Certif - OEM​

$64.99​

​

1 x ($59.79) ASUS M5A78L-M/USB3 AM3+ AMD 760G + SB710 HDMI USB​

$59.79​

​

1 x ($7.99) Silverstone Model PP07-BTSB 11.81" Sleeved Extensi​

$7.99​

​

2 x ($0.57) Coboc Model SC-SATA3-18-BK 18" SATA III 6Gb/s Data​

$1.14​

​

Total Amount: $1021.32


Using RaidZ was expecting ~9TB of usable space but after getting everything setup I have only ~7.8TB. This from a 3x1 Z1 pool of 3TB drives = 12TB total raw storage. Does this sound right to folks? This findingwas a bit dissatisfying.

I've never put a computer together before and other than spinning wheels for 3 hours after forgetting to plug in a 12v connector I was up and running on 9.2.1.3. Much success!

Am currently wrestling with the miniDLNA and PlexMediaServer plugins and having all sorts of troubles. Mostly guessing they're permission related. I have the services starting up ok but cant see any of the media files. Another problem i've had I believe is related to the onboard realtec nic. It gets watchdog timeouts under heavy network load. I'm copying about 300GB of data from another computer onto a CIFS share from the NAS box and that goes ok for about 10 minutes before the network craps out. Looks like i'm getting about 80MB/s data transfers over a 100MB network. Since it's a home setup with 2-3 total users I thought a gigabit network would be overkill.

Anywho, hope some of this might help some other noob. I've received a ton of information from these forums and likely couldn't have done it without it.

Cheers!

 

[hungarianhc]

Regarding the hardware, one of my concerns is that those drives aren't NAS-specific drives. The green drives are usually better in things like DVRs... I would have purchased either Seagate / Western Digital from their NAS line, for WD it's called "Red." If you're doing a Raidz1, then you're somewhat accounting for drive failure by having redundancy built in, but for the nominal price increase, I would have gone w/ NAS drives.

Regarding the usable space, drives format to less than what they're advertised for. This is to be expected. I'm not sure if there is anything FreeNAS / ZFS adds that would reduce available space even more, but I'm assuming it's more due to the fact that a gigabyte is actually 2^N big instead of a factor of 10, which is how they're advertised.

With Plex, I'd recommend installing it in its own Jail manually, rather than using the plugin. This makes it a lot easier to upgrade later on. A good guide to that is here: http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...-to-install-plex-in-a-jail.19412/#post-109086

In terms of adding storage, you're right that it's probably mostly permission related. I had some early struggles with this. I'm sure you have already clicked the "add storage" button on the jail to add your media. If you use the terminal, can you see your media? For plex, I would recommend just doing a read-only share, and make sure you check the permissions on the volume itself. The key is to see who has read-only access (group / user), and you can create that group w/ the same group ID in your jail and add your plex user to that group.

Not sure about the crapping out w/ CIFS, but something tells me that it isn't a FreeNAS issue. One way to test is to directly connect to the FreeNAS server and see if it craps out when you do a large transfer. My speculation is that you have an issue with your router that can't handle such high throughput.

Full disclosure: I'm new to FreeNAS as well. I just got my system up and running this weekend so maybe something I said isn't 100% right, but hopefully it'll put you in the right direction!

 

[Yatti420]

Make sure you run wdidle on the greens... Can you post the output of "zpool list"..

 

[Mooja]

Agreed the Red/NAS drives probably would have been a better choice. Probably would do that if I were to re-order now. I skimped here a bit because I figured this would be a pretty low usage system as NAS goes. I'll likely even be turning it off nights, some weekdays, vacations, etc. To the extent that heat affects longevity this is a pretty cool running system and sits in a cool corner of the basement.

A couple other points about this setup. The FD case comes with a top mounted USB3 port but the motherboard I bought doesn' t have a connector for that. So hard to match all the pieces together correctly especially when using ECC DRAM. I probably spent 10-12 hours going over hardware selections. Another glaring gap is a lack of any sort of offline backup. I have ~500GB of family photo's and videos that should be backed up but that seems way beyond any sort of affordable backup device. What do other people use for backup? Am thinking about buying a 1TB drive to copy backups to a few times a year and pulling it out to put in a safe deposit box at my bank when not in use. Anyone do anything like this? The rest is all movies & music and while it would suck royally to lose those at least they are replaceable.

Thanks for the wdiddle tip. I haven't come across that yet and will give it a whirl. I imagine that should also affect longevity.

Hmmm, the zpool list is showing 10.9T size. But when I look at properties of the CIFS share it shows 7.8T size. Neither seems right as I have 4x 3T drives in Z1 so am expecting ~9TB of usable space.

# zpool list
NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT
MediaZ1 10.9T 1.5T 9.4T 0% 1.00x ONLINE /mnt
# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT MediaZ1 10.9T 1.5T 9.4T 0% 1.00x ONLINE /mnt

 

[HoneyBadger]

Sorry for the loss of the baby pictures. I know how irreplaceable those are.

For offline backup, with 500GB of information you're way beyond the point of being able to burn to triplicate on DVD.

If you have the bandwidth I would say something like CrashPlan, BackBlaze, or Amazon Glacier. You'll pay between $5 and $10/month for the service. You could also build a second FreeNAS machine with a simple two-drive mirror and do snapshot pushes or rsync files, but the offsite advantage is that it wouldn't be lost in a serious disaster like fire/tornado/theft/local zombie apocalypse.

Regarding the "9TB" issue it's probably all down to the age-old war between terabyte and tebibyte.

A terabyte is 1x10^12 or 1000000000000 bytes.
A tebibyte is 1024^4 or 1099511627776 bytes.

HDD manufacturers rate capacity by decimal TB (terabytes), so 3TB is 3E+12 bytes, but computers display in binary TiB (tebibytes) so you see ~2.73TB per drive. With three of them that's about 8.19TiB unformatted, and ZFS's metadata redundancy eats into that, so you're left with 7.8TiB usable space.

 

[pschatz100]

To the OP:
I'm just learning about ZFS myself. With your particular 4 disk set up, one disk is providing "redundancy" which gives your pool the capacity of three drives minus what you lose to formatting. I think the amount of capacity you have sounds about right. Cyberjock has a nice discussion about ZFS volumes on the noob forum. Search for it... well worth the time.

My system is used for storing media (which doesn't change often) and backups of my main PC. I purchased an external 3Tb disk, and backup the NAS to it once a month then take the disk offsite. Not expensive and easy to do. I am considering the Crashplan plug-in for more regular backup of the PC data but haven't done it, yet.