OpenMediaVault user testing FreeNas

[Neurotone]

I wanted to stick with a Linux system being that I know understand Linux better than FreeBSD. My normal computer it's Linux so the thought was understanding the commands and the structure better. I knew nothing about FreeBSD. Right now I am trying it in a VirtualBox probably like most many people do first off what a big difference in the layout quite frankly it is very beautifully laid-out. Freenas is giving me second thoughts even though my OMV is set up and running quite nicely except for the understanding of bad sectors on one of my 4 terabyte hard drives and s.m.a.r.t I was reading that freenas has a better way to set aside bad sectors but correct me if I'm wrong it's the same program s.m.a.r.t. I read that somebody said they corrected the bad sectors on freenas I don't know if this is true or the dude was BSing someone it happens a lot on forums or his understanding of fixing bad sectors it is smart setting them aside. I wanted to introduce myself and ask just the general question I have 32 bad sectors on a 4 terabyte Hitachi NAS drive. If I switched over to freenas how do you go about correcting or setting aside these bad sectors? I was reading there is no such thing as correcting bad sectors is this true. From my understanding, smart sets them aside and never uses them. Luckily the system that I'm testing FreeNas has plenty of ram just the performance in a virtual machine for testing is quite impressive.

 

[fracai]

I could be wrong, but I don't think FreeNAS or Linux directly handles bad sectors. That's something handled by the drive itself. They'll either be marked bad and never written to again or they'll have already led to data loss. That's something that can be protected against by ZFS and scrubs. "The dude was BSing"

Basically, a bad sector is data that couldn't be read to or written to. What usually happens is they're detected during writes, marked by the drive firmware, and reported by SMART. If you aren't seeing a drastic increase in bad sectors, I personally think you can ignore them. I've seen others indicate that you should consider the drive to be toast and mark it for replacement. It hasn't been my experience that they indicate a failing drive, but that's just anecdote.

 

[sretalla]

What FreeNAS is good at (due to being tied firmly to ZFS) is ensuring that your data remains good regardless of any bad sectors.

 

[KrisBee]

@Neurotone Without seeing what was said elsewhere, I wouldn’t know if it was right or wrong, or needed qualification.

As you’re looking at FreeNAS, my guess it that your are not using OMV’s zfs plugin. You’ve not said whether your are storing your data redundantly, or using your hard drives independently. But, I’ll assume you’re using traditional linux software RAID (mdadm), or possibly mergerfs with/without SNAPRAID, and the filesystem is ext4.

FreeNAS is based on the zfs, which is a combined volume manger and filesystem. The fundamental question is how, for example, does “mdadm + ext4” compare to “zfs” when it comes to the detection and mitigation of possible data loss due to HDD failures, including bad sectors? But a bad drive in OMV is still a bad drive in FreeNAS ( see for example: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/currently-unreadable-pending-sectors.73448/ )

The use of zfs has it proponents over at OMV, where you’ll find the limitations of mdadm discussed in detail. If you really want to stick with linux, then you should explore the use of zfs on OMV before making a choice between that and FreeNAS. Also be sure to understand the diifering hardware requirements when comparing the two.

P.S Some technical background. Does OMV incldue a cron job for mdadm scrub?
https://unix.stackexchange.com/ques...ocate-bad-sectors-in-linux-from/364499#364499

 

[Neurotone]

what I have is an ASRock 760GM-HDV Athlon II X4 645 8GB Ram ddr3 one 150gb SSD for the OS and two Amazon Maxdigital (Hitachi) 4 terabyte hard drives just a home built machine due to having an extra processor. I have room for four more hard drives everything is backed up off-site. I was watching a lot of tutorials last night on freenas little more to it or I guess I could say different on setting it up for the same results.

Yes, you are correct @KrisBee ext4 on both drives I was planning on purchasing two more for the redundancy as of right now if my drive fails I lose my data but like I said that's okay I have it backed up offline. I was or am on a budget building this I received my first hard drive separate from the second and I got a little antsy in the pantsy and wanted to have something to play with. Prior to setting up OMV, I was running and actually still am running a Vero 4K + and doing external drives plugged in and transferring my media through the network to the external drives. I did this for quite a long time. Now I stream my media through the network to the Vero 4k+, but I do have Plex and Plex pass I personally don't use Plex that much but I have it for a couple of family members so they can have the benefit of watching home videos and pictures yeah.

I saw everything that I use on OMV is also available on freeNas such as Rsync, all the networking four windows and Unix, SNMP, and Docker. I guess what I'm trying to do is convince myself to switch over haha even though I am familiar with OMV. I noticed a lot of people complaining about the new UI on FreeNas I have seen in tutorials where in the tutorial they would use the new UI and then switch back to the old UI so I'm taking it the new UI is not complete or is missing some functionality?

Sorry for making this such a long post once again. Being that I have everything backed up even though it is a pain in the butt transferring even on a Gigabit Network if I change it to ZFS raid 1 would that probably be the best option? I am planning on getting two more hard drives in the future either 6 terabytes or 4 TB. All recommendations welcome and thank you all for the replies. thank you for the link to all the info it was helpful!

 

[KrisBee]

I can only re-iterate that you need to decide if your current hardware is suitable to run FreeNAS.
See: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/

Unlike OMV, FreeNAS does not have native support for docker. Docker apps have to used inside a linux virtual machine with all the overheads that involves.

In general, the number of HDDs you have will limit the possible zfs layouts ( mirror, raidz1, raidz2 etc), but I would read this and pay attention to how a zpool can grow: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/resources/introduction-to-zfs.111/

 

[Neurotone]

Maybe I will stick with OMV.

 

[Neurotone]

You know at first I was thinking Ixsystems was just trying to sell a product going to the FreeBSD page I understand that's not the case. There are a lot of limitations to hardware. Even on the latest stable FreeBSD. That may have to do with the fact that there are not as many people in the FreeBSD Community as the Linux community. Any old who free FreeNas is very cool but without Docker. I swore I saw a vid thumbnail running Docker on freenas when I looked it up on Google perhaps it was spinning up a virtual machine of Linux and then running docker in a VM. That's what I get for just looking at headlines of the web pages on search engines or thumbnails of videos. I can tell you one thing I wouldn't mind having a FreeNAS Mini 4 Bay system from Ixsystems. Just for the professional build quality whatever I decide to run on it. If you look on the front page a freenas.org there's a section that says who's using freenas and they have Dr.Phil along with some reputable companies and government sorry I thought that was super funny. Now is it Dr.Phil himself or Dr.Phil's company if so I'd like to know what Dr.Phil is rocking and what he is using it for. Because if his name is on the website you know he's getting free 24/7 tech support I can just hear his voice (Now son what the problem here is I have some bad sectors) @KrisBee and, of course, everyone else in this thread I'd like to thank you for all your time and information and help thank you very much.

Happy Nasing