Noob setup and a question on drive disconnections

[popalu]

Hi all, stumbled across this fantastic free software by accident, after looking into Windows Home Server and deciding it was too expensive and ended up here after googling.

I have been sharing 2 drives on my main computer, but found this slow and when it was off, nobody could get at any files.

So, I have taken the plunge and set up a FreeNas 8.2 Box. I had an old Pentium lying around, so I dropped in two 1TB drives and a 30gb drive and installed FN on the smaller drive and all is working and everyone in the house now has access to the drives.

The only issue I seem to be having is that sometimes I lose connection to one of the drives, mid-way through copying to/from it. The drive drops it's connection, but I can go straight back on and access it again, but it has happended a few times now, even though FN is reporting the drives as healthy.

The only thing I can see which is suspect is the amount of ram the PC has in it, as I said it was an old machine lying around, so it only has 512mb in it, do you think if I beef up the ram to whatever the board can take, think it can handle 2 x 2GB strips, this will stop this happening or am I experiencing a known problem, which is caused by something else?

Any help appreciated on this problem :)

 

[ProtoSD]

Hi popalu,

You didn't mention how you had your drives formatted, so if the answer is ZFS, then you definitely need more RAM. If you're using UFS, you can get away with less, but you should still have more the 512MB.

When you say you're running 8.2, are you using a nightly build? or have your just mistaken the OS version FreeBSD 8.2 for the FreeNAS version which the latest is 8.0.2 (8.0.3 coming VERY soon, week or less)?

 

[popalu]

Sorry, all drives are ZFS with CIFS shares. The version I have is 8.0.2, missed out the 0.

Seems like I need to put some more ram into this thing, everything was easy to setup and use, just this pausing and loss of connection, thought it might be the ram, I will dig some out and put it in to see if it fixes this issue

 

[popalu]

I added a gig of ram which I had lying around and that seems to have solved the issue, there have been no more pauses or disconnections when copying to and from the drives tonight.

I think I will look to beef that up by 2 x 2GB or even 2 x 4GB if I can find some cheap enough and that should speed things up a bit and stop the issues.

Hopefully this won't come back in the coming days, thanks for the advice.

Pop