Rackable C1000 and Enclosure with m1015

[some_guy_named_ed]

I've got a pretty good supply of usb sticks and systems to test them in. I'm leaning towards thinking the ports on the c1000 may be fried (or just slightly overcooked since they just perform badly). In either case, are you confirming that unreliable usb performance can cause the hangs I've been having since I'm using the embedded version?

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

I'm sorry but I can't confirm it. But your theory sounds plausible. I would at the very least try another stick and see what happens.

 

[Richman]

Seriously, just trash the usb stick and buy a new one. If you suspect that a $10 usb stick could be at fault, then just get a new good one.

But I would suspect that it's going bad.

I have never had issues with Sandisk Cruisers that I have had ad have had several. Seam to last forever and are indestructible. Specially my Titanium encased ones. Their read/write speed is dead in the middle at about 15MB/s but that doesn't really matter much ....... I mean I don't feel that is too excruciatingly slow and if you rarely rebooting whats the dif. if it takes 30 sec. to boot or the max. low boot time of the fastest at 10 seconds.

I've got a pretty good supply of usb sticks and systems to test them in. I'm leaning towards thinking the ports on the c1000 may be fried (or just slightly overcooked since they just perform badly). In either case, are you confirming that unreliable usb performance can cause the hangs I've been having since I'm using the embedded version?

My understanding that a hang from the USB could only be on boot or shut down as the system is loaded into RAM once booted. I thought any logs files were written to the USB when the system shuts down.

 

[some_guy_named_ed]

I think I have a final answer type of test:

I'm trying an old pata laptop drive I had lying around. I used a Frankenstein adapter to connect it to my main PC via USB and get the embedded image loaded on it. Performance while writing the image was nice and fast. After that, I connected it to the freenas server's pata controller and it booted right up. I've begun my test which is about 30 gigs of files of mixed size and type.

So far I've had no drops in write speed. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. The final test would be to see if I can switch the pata drive back to usb mode and check the performance again.

--EDIT/Update--

Looks like I got nearly the same performance when hooked up via USB. I'm kicking myself right now. The usb stick I was using when I was having the problems was bought because it would fit in the usb slot on the mobo and allow me to still close the case. That.. and the fact that one reviewer on the part said they used it for an embedded install of freeBSD. I tried two different sticks, but both the same exact type. When I finally tried a kingston 8gb I had lying around, all seems to be working. As a pleasant surprise, when I cracked the shell open on the kingston stick, the guts were in face small enough to fit in the case. Maybe the crappy usb stick was triggering some sort of blocking interrupts or some other madness. I dunno, but it seems to be ok now. Hopefully it stays that way.

 

[Fr Jonah]

Hi, ed...

We just bought a rackable c1000 for our small business and your post is the closest thing we've seen to explaining how to get it functioning. We've tried to install freenas, but it always fails installation, which prompted us to give Open Media Vault a try... we did eventually get it installed and working on a connected usb hard drive, but several aspects of the unit are starting to concern us...

• It sounds like freenas installation is just out of the question with the existing RAID controller (which drives the SAS also)... is that correct? Do we need to break down and pick up an ebay m1015 as you describe?
  
• Is it possible to install an internal hard drive in one of the 2 sata drive bays on the front? Every time we install one, the c1000 sees it but it blocks the SAS array from connecting... this is why we ended up installing OMV on the usb hard drive instead. We'd love to just install some mirrored ssds in those front bays and go from there, but not sure if it's possible or worth it based on the SAS link failing every time when we install one drive.
  
  
• Is there any way to get the noise down a touch on this unit? It's unreal how loud it is... obviously, the fans are spinning at max to avoid overheating. Changing the bios to "Closed Loop" (i.e. throttling fans based on temp. readings) has no effect.
  
• How is the Power Consumption of the c1000 with attached SAS unit? If it's really insanely high, maybe we'll look for another solution.
  

Sorry for the 20 questions... I've got a couple of days invested in trying to figure this out and, while we have a setup now which is *basically* functioning, we're getting terrible r/w speeds (around 44mb/s best case!) and we're starting to have doubts.

If you can provide any assistance, that would be fantastic!

 

[Fr Jonah]

Just wanted to follow-up on this post in case there are others out there who bought the Rackable C1000 with 16 drive SAS expander (there's still LOTS of them available on ebay)... We *were* able to get freenas working and have most of the questions I posed above worked out...

First of all, we had to ditch the LSI MegaRaid card in favor of the IBM M1015. I was able to find a pre-IT-Mode flashed card available on ebay for about $105... a bit higher than they used to be, but it does the job nicely. You'll also need mini-SAS to SAS cable mentioned in some_guy_named_ed's original post. We bought a 1M cable and it's more than long enough to do the job.

To change the MegaRaid card out for the M1015 card, there is a little clip you'll need to pull directly up on (on the far right of the port side of the c1000) to allow the removal of the PCI-e MegaRaid card. Once out, you'll need to attach the mini-SAS cable to one of the ports on the M1015 and run it out the opening created by removing the MegaRaid card... do not attempt to use the plate from the MegaRaid on the M1015... the mini-SAS cable won't fit out the front of the c1000 if you do that. Once you have it fished through the front of the c1000 box, you'll need to attach the internal mini-SAS cable run from the internal 2x2.5" SATA drive bay to the other port on the M1015... this step is a challenge... in our case, we had to cut the zip ties holding the power cables together and stretch it the cable as far as possible... after doing this, there was *just* enough room to connect the SATA to mini-SAS cable (already in the C1000 and previously connected to the MegaRaid card) to the M1015... it's almost kinked in there, but it did fit. (Note: We just left the battery and cables in there that were connected to the MegaRaid, but we will probably end up taking all that out to sell on ebay with the MegaRaid card itself since those cards are going for $75 or so and we now have no use for it...)

At this point, you're basically golden... just close up the c1000 and connect the cable sticking out of the front of the c1000 to the SAS expander and turn everything on (SAS Expander first, then c1000). We used a 4TB flash drive with the latest freenas boot image (for flash drives) (V. 9.2.1.5) and freenas loaded without incident the first time.

As for the noise issue, the c1000 is VERY loud... our solution is to build an acoustic dampening box to place the server in and place it in a part of the shop where no one works... I don't have any data to report on power consumption, but I don't expect it to be good news :)

The unit we bought came with 4x1TB WD Re4 Enterprise drives, which we setup in a RaidZ2 array. We were able to setup Apple shares with no issues whatsoever... to get CIFS shares working on 9.2.1.5 you will need to patch the install as described here... thanks to Cyber Jock for the tutorial. Once the patch was applied, the freenas share started showing up in Windows without incident.

Next steps are to determine if I should go ahead and add a few more drives to my existing zpool (i.e. destroy it and rebuild it with 6 drives instead of 4) or if it will be better to simply add more vdevs later to enlarge the overall pool... It's been a lot of fun so far and a phenomenal learning experience... and, for an overall investment of around $450, I think we've ended up with a very high performing, highly expandable server.