Pulled a disk for testing, web UI not responding.

[diskdiddler]

Just to go back on topic, with 8gb, I pulled a disk for testing, WebUI held on (although the array was mostly empty, it has some data)
So at least there's that, replacing a disk was awkward but I've found out how to do it.

 

[joeschmuck]

You can do what I do, stick it in the basement!

If I had 5TB drives, I'd only need 2 and then mirror them.

 

[diskdiddler]

Ahh we don't all have large places, the reason I can afford so many large disks is because I'm in a small tight place unfortunately.
The box can either be in my bedroom (nope!) or the lounge, 4' from the TV, so when it's streaming a movie, best it's quiet :/

 

[cyberjock]

My server is 24 WD Greens and it used to be in the back of my living room. If it weren't for the fact that my house doesn't have central A/C it would still be in my living room. :P

It wasn't silent, but I definitely watched my movies without realizing the server was in the back of the room. ;)

 

[diskdiddler]

I put the server on top of a phone book, on top of a towel folded 7 times over, with a box on top of it and still it's very noisy. I made a dumb impulsive purchase and paid the price, I'll stick with 5400's regardless from now on.

 

[AleQQ]

7200 RPM drives run fast and hot, that is their primary criticism. Try a 15000 RPM drive sometime. Server rooms aren't quiet, they are efficient.

Additionally, Toshiba doesn't explicitly list those as being NAS drives, which run intellipower (or sometimes 7200 RPM) and are tuned to reduce exponential reverberation from having multiple disks spinning at the same time. Might be adding to your noise issue. (or the NAS drive manufacturers are full of crap and trying to sell intellipower drives with better warranties as being somehow special)

 

[AleQQ]

My server is 24 WD Greens and it used to be in the back of my living room.

Do you have a separate SAS enclosure for all those drives? And what do you use for your controller? I would read through your posts to find out, but 12,000...*shudder*

 

[diskdiddler]

It's mostly actuator rather than spindle motor - although the spindle isn't ideal either. Definitely actuator though, just awful.
Not much I can do.

 

[cyberjock]

I'm using an M1015 reflashed to IT mode, an Intel SAS expander and 24 drives in a Norco 4224 case. ;)

My complete server specs are in my noobie guide. ;)

 

[AleQQ]

sounds like it's time to do some googling. And possibly drooling...

 

[joeschmuck]

@diskdiddler
How are your drives mounted? Is there any sound/vibration mounts or are the drives bolted right to a metal frame? If they are bolted to a metal frame, you might be able to add rubber grommets if you're handy enough. I converted every enclosure I've had over the past 10+ years to use rubber grommets and it makes a difference.

 

[diskdiddler]

The enclosure is a HP Microserver N40L
Honestly if I could return the disks I would, at this point I'm not going to be able to run FreeNAS due to the 6 actuators moving at once. (Would I be right in thinking cyberjocks rig has 24 actuators moving at the same time....? ouch)

I simply can't run or learn FreeNAS, not with all that noise. Mind you I did just get up to the stage of trying to figure out how to make sickbeard / sab etc work and it was going to frustrate the heck out of me anyhow. I actually don't want them to have their own jailed off storage, that was going to plague me for half a day easily.

EDIT:
Oh yeah, I was only getting 70 to 85MB/s sustained writes over gigabit ethernet (I can exceed 100 on this network to my Windows machine) - that kind of surprised me too, considering it's a 6 disk system and specifically to a compression off folder.

 

[cyberjock]

Yes, I have up to 24 drives that move at a time, but I also planned ahead very well for myself and deliberately went with disks that had a reasonable amount of actuators, good power consumption and low RPM.

Building a "good" long term NAS is more than just buying a bunch of crap at Fry's or Microcenter and putting it together. It's about planning ahead for potential problems and making sure you know what you are buying yourself into.

There's a difference between engineering a good NAS and building one. One is done by a professional that knows all the ins and outs, the other is some schmuck (no offense to joe) that doesn't know better and thinks it's just about specifications and costs.

 

[diskdiddler]

What do you mean disks that had a reasonable amount of actuators? I'm under the impression that the actuator motor is an individual motor moving the heads across the platters all at once, there's not individual actuation of each head (to my knowledge) a seek on platter 1, side 1 will also mean platter 4, side 2 - the head is moved to the same approximate platter location there.

Unless you mean disks with less platters and therefore less weight in the actual heads (I used to try to stick to 3 platters or less)

 

[cyberjock]

Technically they don't have actuators. They have voice coils, and they have one per disk.

The real sound during head movement is due to the mass of the assembly that moves. That includes a part of the voice coil, the arm, and the heads. More mass means more vibration and more noise.

Disks with less platters will have less heads which means less arms and therefore less mass.

 

[diskdiddler]

I've mounted the thing inside a kitchen cupboard (it's ventilated, surprisingly) final chance for noise, in the next day or two I'll know if it's unacceptable or not, fingers crossed.

Then there's the mission of getting it to "do stuff" - sab / sick / couch / crashplan etc. The jails concept I get but the way it actually can't see ALL my data outside of one particular area is a bit awkward.
(Example, I don't use sickbeard to download stuff, what I actually do on Windows is have a directory called "incoming TV" -sickbeard scans it every 20 minutes, picks up a new file, matches it and renames it nicely into my library... honestly I'm using sickbeard really as a very high end renaming service)

 

[cyberjock]

Oh.. you are installing it in a cupboard! You'd better post pictures dammit! I've thought about doing this with a desktop but as I'm not mechanically inclined I tend to think it's much more complex than I think it is. ;)

 

[diskdiddler]

I'll show pics if I don't cook disks. How can I "force" a SMART check to observe the drive temp all the time?? I found an option to make it check frequently but not a live chekc?
It's winter here in Melbourne - about 68f in my apt. but my place can get up to 91f in summer (yes, inside)....
I'm hoping to keep these drives under 131f in there./

EDIT:
Any idea on performance? I'm using SATA3 drives and I believe all 6 ports are SATA3 (any way to check?) I'm seeing writes now after doing some reslivering testing as low as 25mb/s sustained over gigabit. I can deal with 75mb/s but 25mb/s is kind of pitiful.
8gb ram, AMD Turion II CPU - CPU load isn't exceeding 15% at most?

 

[cyberjock]

Every SMART check involves checking all aspects of the disk, of which temperature is one aspect.

If performance was something you cared about you shouldn't have gone with just 8GB of RAM and a Turion II CPU. Both of those are recipes for very slow speed.

The N40L was slow with FreeNAS 8. FreeNAS 9 has even steeper hardware needs so you are even more behind. :P

The Turion II CPU that the N40L uses was very low performing when it was released... 3 years ago.

 

[diskdiddler]

It was writing 75mb/s when I first set it up, once a disk was reslivered and a few plugins installed (note: plugins are doing nothing at this point, simply fresh installed) it's dropped to 35m/s

I just taught myself this dd if / of business and I'm writing out a big 8gb file in 4k blocks to the /mnt/DATA1/ - it's achieving 35mb/s so it's not the network.
Pic attached, mid DD

EDIT:
Disabled all plugins, all jails, rebooted - same performance, 40MB/s
Going to continue testing, destroying entire volume, starting again from scratch now - glad I'm doing some testing.