Progress update on my Dell T110-II FreeNAS, possibly useful info. for others.

[brianm]

I started a thread on this project recently but the plan changed and I might have some useful items to report.

Case, moboard and power supply original T110.
Added 32 Gb memory.
Upgraded CPU to E3-1270V2.
Added Intel NICs.
Will be fitting 4x2Tb WD Red disks, waiting on Amazon delivery right now. My two test disks are connected to two of the mobo SATA connectors.

Comments.
1270V2 change is a simple "drop in" upgrade. V3 and higher versions of the 1200 CPUs will apparently not work with the T110-II motherboard. Cost $149.
Intel NiCs a drop-in also.
Memory is not Dell but correct specs. and works fine. Paid $50 per 8 Gb stick on EBay which I thought was a good deal.
The drives - interesting problems. I originally had four 1Tb 2.5 inch drives on hand but connecting these to adapters and fitting them into the 3.5 inch trays was not successful because there is no way to fit the Dell supplied SATA power connectors to the drives unless you use the large 3.5 inch SATA size adapter trays rather than the small metal ones. In the end it was too much trouble and expense to use the 2.5 inch drives so I returned them to Amazon (great service) and purchased four 3.5 inch 2Tb drives. These I hope to connect directly to the MoBo but I may re-flash the H200 eventually.

So, the system is working. I carried out all of the Dell diagnostics and all systems are go. I moved a bunch of video around the datasets with no problems.

Remaining questions if someone could be helpful.

I do not plan to encrypt. The only encrypt option I can see is under Storage/Volume Manager in the GUI but presently during boot I see something like "Device created, 128 bit AES, hardware encrypt". Are my test drives presently encrypted as the boot text could imply or am I doing the right thing by not checking the encryptation box during volume creation?

What raid pattern would you suggest for four drives (requirement is reasonable speed but very good reliability) ?

Thanks, Brian

 

[Chris Moore]

My recommendation would be to get 5.25 to 3.5 adapters for the CD-ROM drive bays and put a total of 6 hard drives in this unit and then run RAID-Z2.
RAID-Z2 gives a reasonable amount of reliability but it's kind of silly to do raid Z2 with only 4 drives.
The message you're seeing about encryption just means that your drives are able to be Hardware encrypted but that doesn't mean that they are being encrypted. If you think you want to do encryption you need to read up on it first because it can be hazardous.

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[brianm]

Thanks again Chris.
I had gathered that encryption might not be the best way to go which is why I wanted to make sure that I had not accidentally encrypted the drives when I saw that boot message.

As I was installing my new drives I saw that "multiple drive" mirrors were an option so that is what I used. Since I am only using 83Gb of test data presently I can always clean and re-install the drives in the future if I discover a better option. I have FreeNAS on an SSD disk in one of the 5.25 inch bays so I'm reluctant to disturb that disk. I have been moving data, in 17 to 33Gb chunks, around the drives using multiple datasets and everything seems to be working fine. Interesting to watch the action in the Reporting section.

Next job is to set-up and test backups. It looks as though portable drives using the e-SATA port may be a way to go.

 

[Chris Moore]

Thanks again Chris.
I had gathered that encryption might not be the best way to go which is why I wanted to make sure that I had not accidentally encrypted the drives when I saw that boot message.

As I was installing my new drives I saw that "multiple drive" mirrors were an option so that is what I used. Since I am only using 83Gb of test data presently I can always clean and re-install the drives in the future if I discover a better option. I have FreeNas on an SSD disk in one of the 5.25 inch bays so I'm reluctant to disturb that disk. I have been moving data, in 17 to 33Gb chunks, around the drives using multiple datasets and everything seems to be working fine. Interesting to watch the action in the Reporting section.

Next job is to set-up and test backups. It looks as though portable drives using the e-SATA port may be a way to go.

Good work doing the testing and learning before printing any real data in the system.
I have contacted backup drives by eSATA and it worked fine for me.
What hardware do you plan to use when you get ready to take this live?

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[Chris Moore]

PS. The SSDs are not sensitive to orientation or vibration, so you can literally jam that thing anywhere it will fit.
The 5.25 bays would serve you better for additional hard drives. You can put 3 more drives in the two 5.25 bays using the proper adapters.

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[brianm]

Chris,

Fortunately I am under no pressure to convert our operations to a server so I have time to learn and experiment. The actual amount of data we need to handle is relatively small and it can be grouped into two types, first, largish volumes of archived data such as video and product data consisting of CAD/CAM files etc., second, there are small active files pertaining to on-going business and accounting.

The server will be in a secure basement below my office with a wired connection to a PC on my desktop in the office (plus other network connections). My computer will be the administrative machine. I am thinking of using the eSata port to make a local backup to drives close to the server and then making an additional remote backup via network. I used to use a program called "Back in Time" under Ubuntu which was great because it made incremental backups under chron. Do you think I could run this software under Freenas? (I haven't found out how jails work yet !)

 

[Chris Moore]

ZFS has a snapshotting feature built into the file system and there is a way to setup incremental snapshots through the FreeNAS user interface. It is really easy to do and any snapshot can be mounted (on a separate directory) read-only to get access to the way the filesystem was at that time while still being able to access the way it is now or you can roll back completely. You don't need any app, just read the documentation.
http://doc.freenas.org/11/storage.html#snapshots

http://doc.freenas.org/11/storage.html#periodic-snapshot-tasks

Also, http://doc.freenas.org/11/zfsprimer.html