Seriously lucked out!!

[jools72]

Hi there, happy to be joining the community.

So I'm just putting this here as a major piece of luck and might save another member hassle with drive failure.
I made 2 mistakes after reading an article recently stating you could expand storage with old drives. Sooooo I bought a 4tb enterprise drive off Fleabay 2nd hand.
That's mistake number 1
I ran the drive in my nas for a week to "run in" and perform smart tests. All good.
Then I made my 2nd mistake. I added it to my pool as a stipe (no mirror). Not a serious boo boo as I do have other copies of my data, I just wanted to centralise everything.
After about a week, the dashboard indicated my pool was unhealthy. Tried zpool scrub and zpool clear but the errors kept coming back. So I turned to the community on FB. Got a couple of answers but I'm not proficient with CLI yet.
I bought a new 4TB ironwolf drive, slapped both that and the offending drive into a "dumb" cloner, left it to do it's thing. Took all day, a very nervous day.
When it finished, I put the new drive in the nas and fired it up. The pool listed as unhealthy because it obviously copied everything from the old drive "bit for bit" and for some reason the share was empty. I uploaded the last system configuration snapshot and it came back online. A new scrub task kicked in and I left it to run overnight. Next morning, entered zpool clear in the CLI and hey presto!! all was well.
So now my nas is back up and running without having to rebuild the shares and data.

So there we go, it seems if the drive is unhealthy but responsive you may be able to copy the stripe and save your system without losing your data.

Hope this helps somebody.

 

[joeschmuck]

First of all, Welcome to the Forums!

Sorry to hear about the bad experiences but it's good those are caught in the beginning before putting a lot of data on your system. So you were not clear, did you create a mirror or still have a stripe? I would assume you have a mirror since you said the stripe was a mistake.

Just some friendly advice, read the forum rules about what type of data we need from you if you ask for help. We typically like to know the version of FreeNAS/TrueNAS you are running, RAM, Motherboard, Hard Drives, Add-On Cards, configuration information if relevant, and of course details on the error/problem. Remember that we are not mind readers and assumptions can lead to a much longer troubleshooting time. We like to fix things quick so everyone has a good experience.

What I liked about your posting is you figured it out on your own which is great. Maybe you will turn out to become one of the contributors to our forum and help others out.

 

[jools72]

Sorry joeschmuck, kinda chuffed I figured out a way around it and didn't think to put my system up. It's an old amd based pc I repurposed.
So it's an AMD fx4100 processor, couldn't tell you the mobo at this moment.
It's got 8GB ddr3 ram with 2X4TB drives (WD and Seagate nas drives) and a Samsung 20GB boot device. I also installed an intel based nic some time ago when it was my sons old pc. I currently have it running TrueNAS 12.0 and until I made my mistakes all was well.

Ok, to clarify I originally wanted 2 separate pools. One for data and files, the other for a media server. Unfortunately I couldn't fathom how to do this or if it's even possible. So I opted to stripe. Yes, I knew it was risky to do so as failure of one drive results in the loss of the whole pool and quite correctly the OS did warn me. However as I have got every file, photo, mp3 etc. on other drives I wasn't too worried about losing the pool. Also, I cannot add a mirror to the existing setup without a complete rebuild as the current setup does not have enough sata ports or drive bays.
As I mentioned, the drive was ok for about a week but after that the pool flagged as unhealthy and errors were occurring. After that happened the pool started going offline when the OS detached the drive. The boot drive and original WD drive would still show in disks but the Hitachi drive was offline.
The worst that would of happened is losing the pool and having to spend time rebuilding it. However, this is a learning experience for me hence part of the reason I decided to try to rescue the situation (the other being the time it would take to rebuild the pool from scratch.) I've never done server grade work at all and I'm pretty pleased with what I've built and that I managed to get out of trouble.

My next project is to build a new server to house my pool with enough extra storage for expansion & mirroring. When complete it will live out of sight in a cupboard (with ventilation) and to get pi hole running in a VM.

Curiously, I have the Hitachi drive in a dock connected to my windows pc and it's been ok so far today. I've formatted it, loaded data onto it and it's spinning away quite happily whilst wiping the data before it gets returned. Hmmmm.........

 

[joeschmuck]

When you do finally figure out exactly the storage you desire, just do yourself a favor and plan it right. If you have a lot of storage (more than 6TB of data I consider a lot), just ensure you double the storage capacity and I would strongly recommend that you have at a minimum RAIDZ1 for redundancy. There is a point in time where it's more valuable to you where just having to replace a drive makes more sense over replacing a drive and reinstalling all your data and whatever else you might have going on. Also remember that hard drives are going to be the most consumable item in the project, they will fail and you will need to replace them. The fans in the system are the second items to wear out and you can expect to eventually replace those as well if you keep the system long enough. The other components (Motherboard/CPU/RAM/Case/PS) generally last the life of the project. Well the PS may fail but if you buy a fanless design then you likely will prolong that too. So spend the money on the items you are going keep for a long time.

When complete it will live out of sight in a cupboard (with ventilation)

Keep an eye on the hard drive temps, while most drives can operate at some fairly high temps, going above 45C is a general area most folks here like to stay away from. My drives generally operate at 40 to 43C but of course could handle much more but they have been running for many years non-stop without issue and longevity is something to consider. If you power the system up/down often the something will fail much sooner than expected.

Sorry for getting on my soap box. Like I said, Welcome to the forums and good luck on your project.

 

[jools72]

LOL, no worries about the soap box. I bow to superior knowledge.
Long story short, I had a WD MyCloud 3TB drive which went belly up. The nic died rendering the device unusable. After pulling and accessing the disk, I decided I wanted another nas device. So I commandeered my sons old pc (I built him a new one for his birthday) and experimented with freenas. Got it working well enough with a minimal configuration that I was happy with it. So it kinda expanded from there. It has my files, over 200 movies, 300 tv show episodes, 80,000 mp3s and now it's fixed I'm pleased as punch. I do foresee a need for more storage as there is currently 2.5TB of space left in the pool and I have quite an extensive DVD/ BluRay collection.
So I want to get hold of a 2nd hand server with multiple bays and a fairly decent cpu for transcoding and VMs' And I guess at least another 4 hard drives, one to extend the pool and three to mirror.
I already leave the server running 24/7 and I don't plan changing that, disk temps are around 35c although I was considering changing the fans as the cpu gets a bit toasty sometimes, needs a better cooler.
Thanks for the advice

 

[joeschmuck]

So there are quite a few people who build a NAS device with huge capacites in order to hold a lot of movies. While that is well and good and fun to do, eventually you may come to the realization that it's very costly to put all that media on hard drives jus to have a "cool factor". My NAS has about 100 movie titles and while it was good for when the grandkids came over, now with streaming services being cheap such as Disney+ it just doesn't make it seem proper to spend so much money for movie storage that is rarely used. So a word of caution and you may learn this the hard way like many of us, but unless you are actually playing a lot of DVD's/BlueRay's often, it's probably not worth it.

I already leave the server running 24/7 and I don't plan changing that, disk temps are around 35c although I was considering changing the fans as the cpu gets a bit toasty sometimes, needs a better cooler.

Before changing the CPU cooler you should ensure that you have good airflow through the case. Good air intake and then good aid exhaust. If your son used this computer in the past for things such as gaming then I'm sure the CPU cooler is fine for FreeNAS/TrueNAS because FreeNAS is pretty minimal unless you are doing video transcoding or some serious VMs. And the AMD stock cooler is pretty good at it's job. Focus on airflow through the case. If the CPU temps stay high during idle operations (no NAS access) then you do have a problem to be addressed.

So I want to get hold of a 2nd hand server with multiple bays and a fairly decent cpu for transcoding and VMs' And I guess at least another 4 hard drives, one to extend the pool and three to mirror.

If noise is not a problem then you could buy a server like what you are thinking of but if noise is a concern then just build yourself a server. You can see my build specs in my signature as an example, server grade motherboard/RAM/CPU. You can easily add removable drive bays but to be honest, if you only plan to replace the drives when they fail, save some money and just hardwire the drives in. Having one or two removable drive bays might be nice if you wanted to play around with extra storage or maybe dedicated VM storage. I really like my High Airflow Case and I have I think 6 hard drives, two SSDs and two fans push air across the hard drives and then one 140mm fan blows air across the motherboard and the case allows all that airflow to escape, but it is a large case. Four drives are for my FreeNAS pool, the others are for ESXi VM's.

Cheers