Took apart last attempt at FreeNAS, new parts

[silvergoat]

I decided to take apart my previous FreeNAS system which wasn't transferring content at a speed I thought would be sufficient for HD content (haven't figured out if I will use compressed or uncompressed yet).

Previous system was Celeron E3300, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 4 WD VRaptors in stripe, gzip compression = 6, ASUS P5KPL-AM EPU board, Intel Gigabit CT

I just ordered some new drives because the previous test run would not give me nearly enough room and I will be working with 5 WD Red 2TB drives in raidz1. The newer system will also use: Gigabyte EP45-UD3R board, Q6600@3.2GHz, 8GB DDR2 RAM, Intel Gigabit CT-

I haven't decided if I will need or use compression. With the previous system @gzip=6, I was saving about 8-9% which gave me pretty much the same storage as a pre-formatted drive. I will be using slower drives so I think I will want to maximize hard drive throughput, and I'm not sure if eliminating compression will help. The file format I am likely to use most is going to be .mkv and almost all content will be video......mostly standard DVD source.

Are there any recommendations for configuration before I start putting this together? My main problem with the first system is that I would max out at ~65MB/s read/writes from the server......which is no better than I was getting with 2 mirrored standard 7200rpm drives so I settled on slower drives and faster equipment to remove the bottleneck and save money.....hopefully getting closer to the max throughput on the raidz1 setup.

 

[fracai]

Set up different datasets for different types of data. I now have my whole pool set to use the default compression (I don't see, nor do I really expect to see anything better than 1x for the compression ratio), but I have my email backup and jail set to gzip-9. I think mail is around 1.5x, jail software is 2x, and the jail system is almost 5x.

When I experimented with different compression formats and video data I did see compression gains, but they were hardly worthwhile. That's why I set the main pool to the default compression (processor efficient and maybe I'll see a bit of i/o gain from the compressed blocks) and used more intensive algorithms for the datasets that I knew would see better ratios.

 

[silvergoat]

I'm pretty sure I will not be using compression, so, is there any specific file format that works best for streaming? I have all my TV DVDs in MKV format, I don't like to do a lot of handbrake conversion because things never come out exactly the way I want them......problems pop up here and there, and I don't have the time to watch everything I transcode, to make sure it's all synced okay.

What do you prefer for storage/streaming format- VOB, ISO, MKV, something else?

 

[fracai]

To be honest, my files are whatever I happened to like at the time that I made the encode. If I were doing things now, everything would probably be h264 MP4s. MKV is fine, but MP4 is supported by AppleTV. I do have several ISOs for DVD images, but when I get the time I think I'll be converting all of these to single title MP4 (with commentary tracks as appropriate).

 

[silvergoat]

Drives are here......will be testing them until I piece it together over the weekend.

 

[Steve Salier]

I run FreeNAS 8.3 on an E3300 with 2 GB RAM, 1 x 1GB interface and 4 x Seagate 7200.14 3TB drives, RAIDZ and no compression and can stream mounted blue-ray ISO's over CIFS mounted on a HTPC with no issues whatsoever ....

 

[silvergoat]

Half of the drives are bad, so I'll be waiting about another week before it goes together.

As I understand it, HTPC requires a video card to do the processing for video- I can do that, but how would this affect it's function as a file server? I think HTPC requires the PC be connected to a TV. I don't have any TV, I just want this accessible at any PC or via xbox for TVs.

I would need to budget for another video card as well, so HTPC is almost entirely out of the question since I've burned out the budget for a while on the new drives.

 

[silvergoat]

-starting over again-