Odroid H2 and FreeNAS 11.2

[George Hartzell]

Wanted to share a quick note about running FreeNAS 11.2 on the Odroid H2: It Just Works(tm).

I'm running an Odroid H2 with 8GB of A-Tech RAM and two 3TB WD RED drives. Installed FreeNAS 11.2 from a SanDisk Cruzer I had in a desk drawer and am running it on a pair of SanDisk Ultra Fit 32GB USB 3.0 Flash Drives.

Some folks have reported problems with drives disconnecting (inadequate power, perhaps?), but I haven't had any trouble.

I ordered the board with its power supply via Amazon, and a "type1 case", and power/SATA cables from Ameridroid. The case is a bit of a puzzle to put together, but Hardkernel's youtube video was sufficient.

The only trouble I've had is with the system losing time. I set the `ktern.timecounter.hardware` tunable (via the FreeNAS UI) to `HPET` (it was `TSC-low`) and it's keeping time beautifully.

The type1 case has a large fan at one end, I have it plugged into the boards FAN connector and the BIOS fan enabled, when it starts spinning it's audible, but only just barely.

Running the Plex plugin and Logitech Music Server in a jail, and dumping Carbon Copy Cloner backups onto it every night.

So far it's running fine.

 

[Jailer]

Interesting. I would keep an eye on performance over time, 8GB is minimum amount of memory for just simple filer. You'd be better off with more running jails.

 

[Chris Moore]

Also, it doesn't appear to support ECC, but if you are going for super compact, I guess that you are willing to make sacrifices.

 

[George Hartzell]

True about the ECC. I'd prefer that it *were* ECC, but...

As for 8GB, also true. At this point it's just a little hack-around box, I'm ony out $340 or so... I've been watching for modern, small 2-drive mirror replacements for my Artigo A-2000 and M'Serve boxes. This seemed like an interesting test-drive. With those two jails running and copy of the "Docker VM" (rancher and *etc* running, it's still showing free memory (quick-n-dirty peak via htop).

 

[Chris Moore]

I am guessing that you might be new to FreeNAS and ZFS, so I will share with you, ZFS uses as much RAM as it can get to cache IO for the storage pool. More cache usually equates to more performance but you also need to have a minimum amount just to ensure stability. The minimum suggested for a 'testing' situation is 4GB, but if you are doing even a small operational NAS, it is 8GB. Under very light load, you may never have a problem. Any memory that you need for jails or VMs should be considered additional memory above the 8GB minimum that is suggested for FreeNAS.
It is cool gear, not doubt. Enjoy.

Here are some links to further reading:

Hardware Requirements
http://www.freenas.org/hardware-requirements/

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/

FreeNAS® Quick Hardware Guide
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/freenas®-quick-hardware-guide.7/

Hardware Recommendations Guide Rev 1e) 2017-05-06
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/

 

[hartzell]

Thanks for the followup Chris. I'm really not new to FreeBSD, ZFS, or FreeNAS.

How much RAM is enough? (I wonder how many electrons have gone whizzing back and forth discussing and debating that question?)

Any answer you choose is predicated on your use case.

This little guy is just that, a little goof around box, and it's behaving nicely. The lack of ECC RAM would be troubling for serious storage duties, the 8GB that's currently in there doesn't seem to be a problem.

I have a pair of HP Microservers running FreeNAS 11.1 with 16GB of ECC RAM each and they're quite happy doing my backup (and backup backup) server duties.

I'd love the see the an update version of a "Your FreeNAS server would benefit from more RAM if: ..." page (e.g. "Your ZFS Arc Hit Ratio is less than X." and *etc*.).

Thanks again,

g.

 

[Chris Moore]

How much RAM is enough? (I wonder how many electrons have gone whizzing back and forth discussing and debating that question?)

All of it? ;)

No, if it is working for what you want. That is great. If you find that it is having problems, you might want a little more. Either way, you decide based on the behavior you observe.

 

[KnowBe4]

Wanted to share a quick note about running FreeNAS 11.2 on the Odroid H2: It Just Works(tm).

I'm running an Odroid H2 with 8GB of A-Tech RAM and two 3TB WD RED drives. Installed FreeNAS 11.2 from a SanDisk Cruzer I had in a desk drawer and am running it on a pair of SanDisk Ultra Fit 32GB USB 3.0 Flash Drives.

Some folks have reported problems with drives disconnecting (inadequate power, perhaps?), but I haven't had any trouble.

I ordered the board with its power supply via Amazon, and a "type1 case", and power/SATA cables from Ameridroid. The case is a bit of a puzzle to put together, but Hardkernel's youtube video was sufficient.

The only trouble I've had is with the system losing time. I set the `ktern.timecounter.hardware` tunable (via the FreeNAS UI) to `HPET` (it was `TSC-low`) and it's keeping time beautifully.

The type1 case has a large fan at one end, I have it plugged into the boards FAN connector and the BIOS fan enabled, when it starts spinning it's audible, but only just barely.

Running the Plex plugin and Logitech Music Server in a jail, and dumping Carbon Copy Cloner backups onto it every night.

So far it's running fine.

Did you encounter NIC driver (RTL8111G ) issue with FreeNAS 11.2?

 

[George Hartzell]

Networking seems to be working fine. I have a Plex server running in one jail and a Squeezebox/LMS server running in another.

What RTL8111G issues are you worried about?

 

[KnowBe4]

What RTL8111G issues are you worried about?

Have your already saturated the NIC to it's max transfer speed?

I do have plan to have this same setup of yours, so I did lot of research. Also, are you aware that sooner or later odroid-h2 will now have stock with new revision that will support M.2 to 4 Port SATA 6G RAID Adapter, so it will now possible to have 6 HDD.

but my biggest concern is that NIC (RTL8111G), since or earlier version of FreeBSD 9 that NIC is already supported. but many user encounter a problem. That they need to compile the driver manually.

 

[George Hartzell]

Have your already saturated the NIC to it's max transfer speed?

I do have plan to have this same setup of yours, so I did lot of research. Also, are you aware that sooner or later odroid-h2 will now have stock with new revision that will support M.2 to 4 Port SATA 6G RAID Adapter, so it will now possible to have 6 HDD.

but my biggest concern is that NIC (RTL8111G), since or earlier version of FreeBSD 9 that NIC is already supported. but many user encounter a problem. That they need to compile the driver manually.

I haven't had any particular problems, but I'm not doing any benchmarks or anything. I'm using stock FreeNAS, haven't had to build anything manually. I haven't followed Odroid's announcements and have no idea if/how it will work with additional disks. I was/am interested in it as a small 2-disk server, even though it doesn't support ECC RAM. For 4 drive servers I like the HP Microservers, which do support ECC RAM.

 

[KnowBe4]

Wanted to share a quick note about running FreeNAS 11.2 on the Odroid H2: It Just Works(tm).

I'm running an Odroid H2 with 8GB of A-Tech RAM and two 3TB WD RED drives. Installed FreeNAS 11.2 from a SanDisk Cruzer I had in a desk drawer and am running it on a pair of SanDisk Ultra Fit 32GB USB 3.0 Flash Drives.

Running the Plex plugin and Logitech Music Server in a jail, and dumping Carbon Copy Cloner backups onto it every night.

So far it's running fine.

how many plex trans-coding instances have you tried with this little beast?

 

[George Hartzell]

I use handbrake to rip DVD's into files that I save onto the H2, then serve via Plex to a Roku stick. I'm not sure if they're being transcoded as they're sent to the Roku or not. I watch one video at a time. So, either 0 or 1.

 

[HoneyBadger]

I read "ODROID" and was worried someone had hackjobbed the FreeNAS UI/UX onto an ARM install of Linux or BSD. Pleasantly surprised to see they're making an x86 board; I knew the Atomic Pi existed but not this thing specifically. Neat.

Re: the "8GB Minimum" that's a FreeNAS peculiar, not a BSD or ZFS thing. You could adjust your arc_max to a lower value to give more breathing room for jails and kernel memory, at the cost of some performance.

For your workload of "screwing around and streaming a single movie over Plex" you'll almost never have a decent ARC hit rate (unless you have kids who rewatch the same shows over and over) so I wouldn't fret too much over that aspect.

Cool build for focusing on low power/heat/size über alles; not my cup of tea for storage but I could definitely see me using one for a fanless HTPC or "family compute" endpoint. Thanks for documenting the setup!

 

[KnowBe4]

@George Hartzell does the S.M.A.R.T test/monitoring works on ODROID-H2?

 

[George Hartzell]

Seems to. The disks have it enabled in the GUI and a quick little test of smartctl seems to Do The Right Thing(tm).

Code:

[hartzell@hydrogen ~]$ sudo smartctl -i /dev/ada0
smartctl 6.6 2017-11-05 r4594 [FreeBSD 11.2-STABLE amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-17, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Red
Device Model:     WDC WD30EFRX-68N32N0
Serial Number:    WD-WCC7K0TZHH64
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 20feeb015
Firmware Version: 82.00A82
User Capacity:    3,000,592,982,016 bytes [3.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    5400 rpm
Form Factor:      3.5 inches
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Mon Jun  3 11:30:06 2019 PDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

Anything explicit you'd like me to try?