Not new to FreeNAS, but new registration to the forums

[Tristan Crockett]

Hello everyone,

Great to be here after finally getting around to registering an account. My name is Tristan. I'm a System Administrator in Auckland, New Zealand for the countries largest Satellite TV company. I'm not new to using FreeNAS (in and out of business) but am new to registering on these forums.

I have a long background of working in the IT industry here in NZ and currently get to work with some reasonable size data technologies like Isilon and TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager). As well as the usual IT technologies like Microsoft *insert whatever here*, AD, Cisco, Red Hat, etc etc. I've also worked with the other free NAS products like Rockstor, OMV and NAS4Free. As well as some experience with Synology. And was recently looking at ReFS on Server 2016 for a personal fileserver at home.

My own personal preference for firewalls is PFSense, so I guess you could say I'm comfortable with BSD. However, I'm really a fan of Rockstor as I see BTRFS as the future of data storage. For home and business. At least on par with or perhaps even taking the lead over ZFS in the future (This is speculation but I'm allowed an opinion). Due to the fact Rockstor is built on CentOS/Red Hat, it has a foot in the door to enterprise and business, as well as enthusiasts.

I currently use FreeNAS because it is stable and dependable. As mentioned above, Rockstor may someday provide that level of stability, but until it does, I'm sticking with the most mature and stable product available.

I'm currently running Freenas on the following hardware. Note, I'm going to be upgrading one of my rigs to a 7700K when Kaby Lake is released, so will be moving an i7-6700 to this file-server.

Intel Skylake Pentium G4400
Gigabyte GA-H170N-WIFI Motherboard
16GB Crucial DDR4 2133Mhz RAM
Inwin Microserver Chassis, Mini-ITX 315W PSU
Intel PRO/1000 PT Quad Port NIC (Low profile)
Intel 600P NVMe 128gb SSD (Cache)
Samsung 840 120GB SSD (Boot) << Had to install Freenas in another machine, then move SSD over due to USB booting problems on Skylake.
x4 Seagate 4TB SSHD (RAIDZ)
Noctua L9i Low Profile CPU Cooler

Autotune enabled. Encryption enabled. Compression enabled. Deduplication disabled.

Deduplication kills volume performance with the G4400, so for now it is off, with encryption and compression enabled. Constantly getting 100MB/S+ (megabytes, not bits) writes to the freenas box through a gigabit LAN from my desktop. Need to run some additional, local performance metrics before and after CPU upgrade.

Anyway, it is great to be here. I look forward to interacting with you all over time and most importantly, happy new year 2017!

EDIT: Grammar.

 

[Spearfoot]

Welcome to the forum, Tristan!

 

[ringohung]

Hello everyone,

Great to be here after finally getting around to registering an account. My name is Tristan. I'm a System Administrator in Auckland, New Zealand for the countries largest Satellite TV company. I'm not new to using FreeNAS (in and out of business) but am new to registering on these forums.

I have a long background of working in the IT industry here in NZ and currently get to work with some reasonable size data technologies like Isilon and TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager). As well as the usual IT technologies like Microsoft *insert whatever here*, AD, Cisco, Red Hat, etc etc. I've also worked with the other free NAS products like Rockstor, OMV and NAS4Free. As well as some experience with Synology. And was recently looking at ReFS on Server 2016 for a personal fileserver at home.

My own personal preference for firewalls is PFSense, so I guess you could say I'm comfortable with BSD. However, I'm really a fan of Rockstor as I see BTRFS as the future of data storage. For home and business. At least on par with or perhaps even taking the lead over ZFS in the future (This is speculation but I'm allowed an opinion). Due to the fact Rockstor is built on CentOS/Red Hat, it has a foot in the door to enterprise and business, as well as enthusiasts.

I currently use FreeNAS because it is stable and dependable. As mentioned above, Rockstor may someday provide that level of stability, but until it does, I'm sticking with the most mature and stable product available.

I'm currently running Freenas on the following hardware. Note, I'm going to be upgrading one of my rigs to a 7700K when Kaby Lake is released, so will be moving an i7-6700 to this file-server.

Intel Skylake Pentium G4400
Gigabyte GA-H170N-WIFI Motherboard
16GB Crucial DDR4 2133Mhz RAM
Inwin Microserver Chassis, Mini-ITX 315W PSU
Intel PRO/1000 PT Quad Port NIC (Low profile)
Intel 600P NVMe 128gb SSD (Cache)
Samsung 840 120GB SSD (Boot) << Had to install Freenas in another machine, then move SSD over due to USB booting problems on Skylake.
x4 Seagate 4TB SSHD (RAIDZ)
Noctua L9i Low Profile CPU Cooler

Autotune enabled. Encryption enabled. Compression enabled. Deduplication disabled.

Deduplication kills volume performance with the G4400, so for now it is off, with encryption and compression enabled. Constantly getting 100MB/S+ (megabytes, not bits) writes to the freenas box through a gigabit LAN from my desktop. Need to run some additional, local performance metrics before and after CPU upgrade.

Anyway, it is great to be here. I look forward to interacting with you all over time and most importantly, happy new year 2017!

EDIT: Grammar.

Dear Tristan,

I'm new to FreeNas and the forum. I having trouble setting up my Nas and I hope that you could help me.

I am trying to setup my FreeNas Corral with the same Gigabyte GA-H170N-WIFI motherboard; however, I fail to get it to boot from the USB thrumbdrive. I have been trying many settings with no good result. I am still struggling and very frustrated! Could you tell my what the Bio setting you are using and the model of your USB thrum drive so that you could boot from a USB thrumbdrive?

Thank you very much in advance!

 

[Tristan Crockett]

Hi ringohung, I am now using that machine as a backup/peered FreeNAS which I plan on running at a family members house in the coming months as offsite replication. I recently reinstalled with Corral, after migrating all of my data to my new main FreeNAS Corral device. A Supermicro Dual Xeon E5-2670V2 with ECC RAM.

A couple of things on the GA-H170N-WIFI. BIOS update it. Ensure its factory reset. Remove all of the other boot devices and have the USB drive you're booting from set as the primary boot device in boot priority with the device you're installing FreeNAS onto as the secondary order device. You shouldn't really have any problems tbh.

EDIT: Also, you should isolate that USB drive by using another drive. I know I've had cases where one USB drive wouldn't work, where another would. Obviously, if that resolves the issue, destroy the bad drive. What are you using to make the USB device? Rufus? If not, give Rufus a try. It's awesome.

I'm actually using an M.2 Intel 600p NVME 128gb as the boot device now, with a 32gb Sandisk USB3 drive as the log drive and a 120gb Samsung 840 EVO as a cache drive.

40 threads in the new machine means I can run quite a number of vm's and docker instances. I'll be sorting a lot more RAM for this machine in the future.