Hey everyone,
I am currently in the process of setting up a FreeNAS system and am hoping to get some input and/or constructive criticism from the community.
The Situation:
I am working at a German university with around 10 people in our group. We perform molecular dynamics simulations which produce binary files between 50-200GB, sometimes larger. 'Good scientific practice' demands, that we store most of those files for up to 10 years and our current storage system with 22TB capacity is maxed out.
Every member keeps their files on their workstation and copies them to the file server as a backup. This new file server needs to store the data securely but reads rarely happen. For this kind of long term storage ZFS seems quite suitable to me, to avoid bit rot and stuff like that.
The problem (as always I guess..) are the finances.
I want to repurpose an old workstation since acquiring new hardware is a bureaucratic nightmare (mostly due to framework agreements..).
The System is an old FujitsuCelsius R550 Workstation with a few parts added.
I already tested it and everything works fine with FreeNAS:
CPU: 2x Intel Xeon X5450
RAM: 4x 2GB Qimonda DDR2 ECC 667MHz
SATA Controller: Renkforce 0+10 SATA III Controller
Boot Device and ZIL are two 120GB SSDs and 10x 8TB Seagate Exos 7E8 perform spinning-rust-duties.
Now why did I do this?
As mentioned above, getting completely new hardware is not really an option (doing it like this is already kind of a grey area..) and we have old workstations just lying around.
I am aware that 8GB of RAM is already the bare minimum but since rarely two users access or copy data at the same time, I think this will be fine.
The ZIL-SSD is due to the FreeNAS manual mentioning it as pretty much mandatory for NFS (of course we use linux in our group) and a SSD-boot device seams faster and more reliable to me than the old USB2 ports.
Currently I am leaning towards a pool of the 10 HDDs as Raid-Z2.
So I hope this use case is of interest to some of you and maybe you have ideas on how to improve this setup or just want to say "What? No!" =)
Best wishes,
Hiasl
I am currently in the process of setting up a FreeNAS system and am hoping to get some input and/or constructive criticism from the community.
The Situation:
I am working at a German university with around 10 people in our group. We perform molecular dynamics simulations which produce binary files between 50-200GB, sometimes larger. 'Good scientific practice' demands, that we store most of those files for up to 10 years and our current storage system with 22TB capacity is maxed out.
Every member keeps their files on their workstation and copies them to the file server as a backup. This new file server needs to store the data securely but reads rarely happen. For this kind of long term storage ZFS seems quite suitable to me, to avoid bit rot and stuff like that.
The problem (as always I guess..) are the finances.
I want to repurpose an old workstation since acquiring new hardware is a bureaucratic nightmare (mostly due to framework agreements..).
The System is an old FujitsuCelsius R550 Workstation with a few parts added.
I already tested it and everything works fine with FreeNAS:
CPU: 2x Intel Xeon X5450
RAM: 4x 2GB Qimonda DDR2 ECC 667MHz
SATA Controller: Renkforce 0+10 SATA III Controller
Boot Device and ZIL are two 120GB SSDs and 10x 8TB Seagate Exos 7E8 perform spinning-rust-duties.
Now why did I do this?
As mentioned above, getting completely new hardware is not really an option (doing it like this is already kind of a grey area..) and we have old workstations just lying around.
I am aware that 8GB of RAM is already the bare minimum but since rarely two users access or copy data at the same time, I think this will be fine.
The ZIL-SSD is due to the FreeNAS manual mentioning it as pretty much mandatory for NFS (of course we use linux in our group) and a SSD-boot device seams faster and more reliable to me than the old USB2 ports.
Currently I am leaning towards a pool of the 10 HDDs as Raid-Z2.
So I hope this use case is of interest to some of you and maybe you have ideas on how to improve this setup or just want to say "What? No!" =)
Best wishes,
Hiasl
