SATA on SAS Expanders in 2016

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AnonymousTrader

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:eek:

You've got some reading to do.

In a non-disparaging way, how familiar are you with zfs, and for that matter with freeNAS? You're looking to setup a new server and don't seem to have a handle on the basics. As I keep mentioning, it would behoove you to buy a system that has professional support behind it.;)
I thought I had a handle on the basics, obviously I have some more research to do.
 
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can we just close the topic? otherwise we are looking at a person who will do damage. that is not funny anymore.

Everyone is actually giving fair advice and trying to gauge what the OP knows about ZFS and storage systems in general. Closing this topic won't help the OP.

To the OP: If you're not comfortable with FreeNAS, trouble shooting it when something goes wrong is going to be difficult. If this is really going to be used in production and it will be the main storage server you are going to need HA. FreeNAS does not offer that type of support only TrueNAS does.

If you are really keen on running this yourself you will need to provide us more detail about how this will be used and how many users. What is going to be served from it? Backup solution? IOP requirements? The more information you provide us about useage the better we can all help you.
 

Spearfoot

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I thought I had a handle on the basics, obviously I have some more research to do.
Yes, sir. Depending on your schedule, you might be better served to call iXsystems and speak with a sales engineer there. They can help you determine your exact requirements and design a system that will meet them. They can also provide a High Availability system if that's what you need, something which is much harder to do on your own. If time isn't a factor, I suggest that you give FreeNAS/ZFS some more study before making any design decisions.
 

TXAG26

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I thought I had a handle on the basics, obviously I have some more research to do.


What a jerk.

To be completely honest with you, I would probably fire an employee for incompetence if they were even thinking of spending that kind of company money on a home-brew solution without proper support and system design. Stuffing it full of desktop-class hard drives was the first huge red flag. This group will go out of their way to help someone learning at home on their own dime and on their own time.

Most of us take exception to placating and further facilitating bad decisions that will directly affect someone's employer and ultimately may get someone fired.

Please don't be offended by any of this as many members here have seen the results of this first-hand. We care, that's why you have received some very candid responses.
 

AnonymousTrader

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To be completely honest with you, I would probably fire an employee for incompetence if they were even thinking of spending that kind of company money on a home-brew solution without proper support and system design. Stuffing it full of desktop-class hard drives was the first huge red flag. This group will go out of their way to help someone learning at home on their own dime and on their own time.

Most of us take exception to placating and further facilitating bad decisions that will directly affect someone's employer and ultimately may get someone fired.

Please don't be offended by any of this as many members here have seen the results of this first-hand. We care, that's why you have received some very candid responses.
I don't take issue with candid responses, I take issue with his suggestion to lock the thread because I am a lost cause. Just...give me some time to take a shower and cool off a bit and I'll post more information on my use-case, as well as what I know about IT and ZFS. I appreciate the responses so far.
 

Spearfoot

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so I am a jerk, because you lack everything about basic IT services? you are begging for a desaster.
Our goal here on the forum is to help people utilize FreeNAS and that includes averting potential disasters. Your suggestion of locking this thread doesn't further that goal, and neither does belittling the poster.
 

AnonymousTrader

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:eek:

You've got some reading to do.

In a non-disparaging way, how familiar are you with zfs, and for that matter with freeNAS? You're looking to setup a new server and don't seem to have a handle on the basics. As I keep mentioning, it would behoove you to buy a system that has professional support behind it.;)

Alright, so let’s talk more about my use-case and what I know about ZFS. First of all, I’m an IT admin / programmer who has been using ZFS on the desktop and my personal NAS for the past five years. I used to use FreeBSD quite a bit, but I am not familiar with FreeNAS. My target for this server is ZFS running on Ubuntu, this forum simply seemed like the best place to ask questions.

I’ve been doing several hours of research on ZFS a day for the past week in preparation for possibly building this server. We haven’t spent any money, we may in fact go with a managed solution. All I’m doing is research. All I’m trying to do is realize the benefits or limitations of managing this server myself and trying to expand my own knowledge.

The server will be used for storage and occasionally Matlab computation. There are two main types of files:
  • Side A: Write rarely, read rarely. Large compressed files. We want to store around 44TB of these to begin with. We read these at the beginning of the month and use them to generate Side B.
  • Side B: Write Rarely, read often. Small files (1200KB, max 30-60MB), 12000+ such files per day. Need to keep 3-4 years of these files. So around 12TB.
When we currently use Side B on our array the process is CPU-bottlenecked rather than IO-bottlenecked. Unless IOPS is particularly unreasonable, I don’t see it being an issue. There will only be around 1 to 2 users at a time. We plan to use Backblaze as our off-site backup solution.

Don't do this, you really don't want to go wider than 12 drives per vdev, and that's pushing it at 8TB drive size. With 8TB drives the most you should think about is 11 drive raidz3 or maybe an 8 drive raidz2.

But really with your price point you should be looking at HA systems (dual controllers) and 24/7 support.
I am aware that RAID7 resilvering times are getting longer and longer as density goes up. I know I had more research to do in the area and I wasn't sure how long resilvering would take with my setup.

To be completely honest with you, I would probably fire an employee for incompetence if they were even thinking of spending that kind of company money on a home-brew solution without proper support and system design. Stuffing it full of desktop-class hard drives was the first huge red flag. This group will go out of their way to help someone learning at home on their own dime and on their own time.

Most of us take exception to placating and further facilitating bad decisions that will directly affect someone's employer and ultimately may get someone fired.

Please don't be offended by any of this as many members here have seen the results of this first-hand. We care, that's why you have received some very candid responses.

I would not fire an employee for offering a suggestion I disagreed with. However I completely understand the desire not to encourage me to make bad decisions, especially with this amount of money. Please know that I am just talking about design theory right now and I'm lightyears away from being comfortable enough to actually buy hardware.

One more thing, can you go into detail about why you disagree with the desktop drive choice? I've checked the reliability on them for NAS purposes based on Backblaze's statistics and they seem very good.
 
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Without getting into too much, Desktop drives aren't designed for 24/7 use, have lower endurance characteristics and usually come with much shorter warranties.

Do you know if you need HA? Is this going to be mission critical?
 

AnonymousTrader

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Without getting into too much, Desktop drives aren't designed for 24/7 use, have lower endurance characteristics and usually come with much shorter warranties.

Do you know if you need HA? Is this going to be mission critical?
Not exactly mission critical. But obviously we don't want it going down. I would not classify it as HA as downtime isn't going to bring an end to our operations, and we should have a backup server in place. I suppose the NAS version of the drives isn't too much more expensive. I'd probably go with that.

Do you have any other comments / concerns?
 

Stux

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I'm wondering how tolerant of a long restore process you will be.

if the zpool evaporated, what would you do? How much of a problem would that be?

Should your budget include a backup system? That you could replicate too. Perhaps offsite.
 

AnonymousTrader

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I'm wondering how tolerant of a long restore process you will be.

if the zpool evaporated, what would you do? How much of a problem would that be?

Should your budget include a backup system? That you could replicate too. Perhaps offsite.
Yeah I'm talking to my boss about RAIDZ2 vs RAIDZ3, letting him know the recommendations against RAIDZ3 with that many drives. We will have an off-site backup solution, as well as a secondary server (our old one) we will also be keeping relatively up to date so we can switch in case of a catastrophe. We only really work with the last 6 months of this data, but it's good to have access to the old stuff in case we need it.
 
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Mirfster

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Yeah I'm talking to my boss about RAIDZ2 vs RAIDZ3, letting him know the recommendations against RAIDZ3 with that many drives.
Maybe I am mistaken, but I don't think anyone mentioned too much of a concern over RaidZ3 vs RaidZ2... I think that the concern was using wide vDev(s) in the Pool (* vDevs consisting of more than 11/12 drives).
 

AnonymousTrader

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Maybe I am mistaken, but I don't think anyone mentioned too much of a concern over RaidZ3 vs RaidZ2... I think that the concern was using wide vDev(s) in the Pool (* vDevs consisting of more than 11/12 drives).
You're right. That's what I meant, I just phrased it in a hurry.
 
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