Rebuilding due to corrupt sector on Samsung need a LOT of advice

[Alister]

First off I know that my current box barely meets the specs for 64 bit freenas - I'm skint (I'm owed money that will buy me a new setup)

Also This might need to be two or more threads?

Users = 1
Usage Recorded TV Series/Films

Current PC

CPU E2180
M/B Gigabyte GA-P31-s3G
Memory 2x2GB = 4GB = max
ASRock SATA Card 2 port

Drives
1 x PATA 40GB - used as boot drive
6 x Samsung HD204UI 2TB (1.8GiB) as a Raidz1 - with Firmware fix

Current situation - due to a failing sector issue on one or more of the Samsung's I'm backing everything up prior to a rebuild.

So when I rebuild on current hardware what I'm going to do is

1 -Still install to the PATA Drive, The boards got a PATA Connector I've got spare drives
2 - Install the drives one by one and boot up into freenas so I can I identify each drive (ATA X) so I know what is what

Questions
Does using a USB boot drive Make a big difference?
Can I set the Swap size to be zero & how do I tell the system to use 20GiB of the 40GB as swap? The system is only use 2MB of swap!
(I got kernal indefinate wait page errors : ( )

When my "mates" stump up the dosh

Gigabyte B75M-D3H S1155 Intel B75 DDR3 mATX 60
Intel Pentium G620 2.60GHz 45
Corsair Vengeance 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz CL9 XMP 73

- the reason for this is that It's the cheapest 16GB set up I can find. The current setup isn't cpu bound at all, so to swap current board and get 8GB set is £100 (50 for board/£50 for ram) this gets me the fastest possible


so can I just transfer all the disks and import on new rig? or would it be better to start from scratch/blank? (I've a pata -> sata adapter as well for boot)

 

[louisk]

Does using a USB boot drive make a big difference in relation to what? It will consume less power and give off less heat. Unless you're booting on a frequent basis, any speed differential should be averaged out to nil.

Why would you want to set the swap size to zero? If you do this, when the system runs out of memory, it will crash. This is not typically desired.

Was the indefinate wait page error followed by "swap_pager: out of swap space" ?

 

[StephenFry]

alister, you can boot from whatever kind of device you want.

It's great that you're making a backup, but after that's done why not replace the hdd with the failing sector, let the whole thing resilver and then export the pool for use in your new system?

 

[Alister]

Does using a USB boot drive make a big difference in relation to what? It will consume less power and give off less heat. Unless you're booting on a frequent basis, any speed differential should be averaged out to nil.

Why would you want to set the swap size to zero? If you do this, when the system runs out of memory, it will crash. This is not typically desired.

Was the indefinate wait page error followed by "swap_pager: out of swap space" ?

The system has PEAKED at 2MB of swap space used - the system is currently showing as having 12GiB of swap space! So No it did not run out of swap space

I'm trying to find if I can set the swap on the boot volume - I've got the space so why not use it?

 

[Alister]

alister, you can boot from whatever kind of device you want.

It's great that you're making a backup, but after that's done why not replace the hdd with the failing sector, let the whole thing resilver and then export the pool for use in your new system?

due to a failing sector issue on one or more of the Samsung's

I think that there may be more than one hdd with issues, I tried replacing a disk but still had issues so I'm going to check each disc in turn (full write verify cycle) so that I am working with known good drives. it's taking days to get the data off the system as the system pauses as the drive does sector retries.

Alister