Morning everyone,
Just a quick hello and where i am currently and a big thanks for all the help on here.
I have been using NAS's for a few years now, albeit, consumer grade Netgear ReadyNAS NV +2 and RN104. All 4 bays and used predominately for family data backup (lots and lots of photos).
I have had a Arima Server with dual Opterons (240 and 8GB) for a couple of years running dedicated servers etc but got rid of it a few years ago (regret that decision) and have been running just a gaming laptop for me and an apple mac for my Mrs.
Not had any issues with either for years and the NAS's have proved their worth and usefulness.
Until this year.
I was using the Netgear proprietary RAID-X configuration and initially had 1TB drives. I upgraded the 1TB drives to 2TB one at a time as instruction and each time took around 36 hours to rebuild. Annoyingly on the last one, for what ever reason, the software decided, whilst rebuilding the RAID, that one of the good drives status's would change from offline to online. Straight away I lost all my data on that one NAS. Technical support was useless and i was forced to rebuild. Fortunately I had a backup on another NAS and was able to recover.
Only last month, the PSU on the NAS failed and a replacement was found finally but still not as easy as I would expect.
These events got me thinking that if the NAS unit failed, i would be at its mercy. A straight swap or component replacement would be very difficult and risky in recovering my data. So why not go FreeNAS.
Having a look around (on here too), there was a lot of good words for Supermicro Servers and for the right price (i know older generation but for what i need its perfect) i settled on the CSE-836 based on;
X8DTH-iF motherboard.
Xeon E5540 CPU (only one for now)
24GB ECC RAM
2 x SATA PCI-e 4 port cards
4 x 1TB and 4 x 250GB drives (for now)
Well through going through all the tutorials on here and advice, i finally have my freenas up and running. Very impressed. The main goal and purpose is resilience. Should the CPU, motherboard, PSU or anything fail I feel I am in a much better position for replacing components and restoring data.
When i created the pools and allocated datasets etc, it was done very quickly (whereas when i built any RAID with the ReadyNAS, it would take at least a day on a brand new array), is this normal? I have yet to do the test of pulling out a drive and rebuilding the array but would expect similar rebuilding times during a "fault" and on a new creation array?
But again, just a big thanks for all the information and hello!
Will get pictures up when i can.
Just a quick hello and where i am currently and a big thanks for all the help on here.
I have been using NAS's for a few years now, albeit, consumer grade Netgear ReadyNAS NV +2 and RN104. All 4 bays and used predominately for family data backup (lots and lots of photos).
I have had a Arima Server with dual Opterons (240 and 8GB) for a couple of years running dedicated servers etc but got rid of it a few years ago (regret that decision) and have been running just a gaming laptop for me and an apple mac for my Mrs.
Not had any issues with either for years and the NAS's have proved their worth and usefulness.
Until this year.
I was using the Netgear proprietary RAID-X configuration and initially had 1TB drives. I upgraded the 1TB drives to 2TB one at a time as instruction and each time took around 36 hours to rebuild. Annoyingly on the last one, for what ever reason, the software decided, whilst rebuilding the RAID, that one of the good drives status's would change from offline to online. Straight away I lost all my data on that one NAS. Technical support was useless and i was forced to rebuild. Fortunately I had a backup on another NAS and was able to recover.
Only last month, the PSU on the NAS failed and a replacement was found finally but still not as easy as I would expect.
These events got me thinking that if the NAS unit failed, i would be at its mercy. A straight swap or component replacement would be very difficult and risky in recovering my data. So why not go FreeNAS.
Having a look around (on here too), there was a lot of good words for Supermicro Servers and for the right price (i know older generation but for what i need its perfect) i settled on the CSE-836 based on;
X8DTH-iF motherboard.
Xeon E5540 CPU (only one for now)
24GB ECC RAM
2 x SATA PCI-e 4 port cards
4 x 1TB and 4 x 250GB drives (for now)
Well through going through all the tutorials on here and advice, i finally have my freenas up and running. Very impressed. The main goal and purpose is resilience. Should the CPU, motherboard, PSU or anything fail I feel I am in a much better position for replacing components and restoring data.
When i created the pools and allocated datasets etc, it was done very quickly (whereas when i built any RAID with the ReadyNAS, it would take at least a day on a brand new array), is this normal? I have yet to do the test of pulling out a drive and rebuilding the array but would expect similar rebuilding times during a "fault" and on a new creation array?
But again, just a big thanks for all the information and hello!
Will get pictures up when i can.
