Unable to switch to Gb

[Yoda]

Hi all,

I'm new to freenas. After some work, finally it works. But, I have a lot of data to transfer daily over the network. So, I changed my whole network to enable Gb. Cables are now CAT 6A cables, computers are all Gb ready and I have a 8 port Gb Cisco switch.

Everything works fine in Gb between the Windows computers.

But I spend a lot of time on Internet to find a solution for the Freenas computer. I can't find a way to bring it to work in Gb. It's only in 100Mb :(

FreenasPC hardware is based on
- GA-73PVM-S2 Motherboard (Realtek 8211B Network adapter)
- Celeron E1200 Processor
- 2 Gb DDR2 PC5300
- 2 HD 2To

Running on FreeNAS-8.0.4-RELEASE-x64 (10351)

Any help is welcome.

Thanks in advance.

 

[cyberjock]

Few comments:

1. I'm not sure if it would even matter if you had Gb performance. With just 2GB of RAM, that's not a very capable machine. Even with 4GB alot of people have had performance issues. Generally speaking, if you read the forums most everyone who has 4GB or less is told to immediately upgrade to >4GB of RAM and then post back if that doesn't fix the problem.

I do realize your issue is not related to RAM, but I'd bet if you had Gb LAN working your post would instead be asking why you are getting only 15MB/sec write speeds. If there's one thing that's been said 100 times in this forum, it's that you should NEVER EVER skimp on RAM. The manual recommends 6GB minimum for ZFS. Anything less and you should be using UFS. Of course, even with 4GB alot of people have poor performance/kernel panics.

2. If you want really good network performance(on top of the RAM recommendation) you should get an Intel LAN card. They can be purchased for about $20 on ebay and newegg. Intel LAN cards are very powerful and can result in a good increase in performance(and are also surely compatible with FreeNAS).

3. You do realize that you are not using the latest version? The latest version as of May 2nd was 8.0.4-RELEASE-p2. I doubt it would solve your problem with your LAN, but it is something that you might want to fix.

 

[Yoda]

Thanks for the reply

I don't use ZFS and will not use it.

At this point of "testing freenas" I'm just sharing folders and making daily backups from the LAN PCs to the freeNAS PC using robocopy.

Looking at the system graphics, freenas don't use the 2Gb of memory available, so what would be the impact of 2Gb more ?

Buying a new interface card could be a "solution", but honestly, I was choosing freenas mainly because I was able to get some cheap parts. If I continue to buy parts, the final price of the homemade NAS would be higher as if I would buy a "standard NAS", so, no sense anymore (for me)

The PC costs was 80€, the Intel card is 30€ here (delivered at home), so not the best option in term of costs. Even if I'm quite sure it would work, for 110€ I can buy a NAS an reduce the electrical consumption a lot compare to the freenas PC.


Using ifconfig on the freenas PC, I cannot switch to Gb, The result is always 100BaseTX :(

I saw a new version came out and yes, I didn't upgrade yet. Thats a point I can try...

 

[Narann]

My problem seems to be router related (waiting for moderating my last post): http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...8168-8111-B-C-CP-D-DP-E-PCIe-Gigabit-Ethernet
You should check your router. Mine was provide by my ISP and was only supporting 100Mb/s :(

 

[cyberjock]

You are mistaken with the memory. FreeNAS uses almost 2GB just for the temporary ramdrive. FreeNAS loads into RAM and saves all of it's logs and whatnot to the ramdrive, only saving changes that need to be persistent during reboot to the USB drive. This is to increase the lifespan of the USB drive.

The FreeNAS manula can be found at http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Main_Page

From the manual:

The best way to get the most out of your FreeNAS™ system is to install as much RAM as possible. If your RAM is limited, consider using UFS until you can afford better hardware. ZFS typically requires a minimum of 6 GB of RAM in order to provide good performance; in practical terms (what you can actually install), this means that the minimum is really 8 GB. The more RAM, the better the performance, and the Forums provide anecdotal evidence from users on how much performance is gained by adding more RAM. For systems with large disk capacity (greater than 6 TB), a general rule of thumb is 1GB of RAM for every 1TB of storage.

NOTE: by default, ZFS disables pre-fetching (caching) for systems containing less than 4 GB of usable RAM. Not using pre-fetching can really slow down performance. 4 GB of usable RAM is not the same thing as 4 GB of installed RAM as the operating system resides in RAM. This means that the practical pre-fetching threshold is 6 GB, or 8 GB of installed RAM. You can still use ZFS with less RAM, but performance will be effected.

If you are installing FreeNAS™ on a headless system, disable the shared memory settings for the video card in the BIOS.

-------------------------------

I'm not really sure where you are getting the idea that you can buy a NAS and reduce the electrical consumption alot compared to a FreeNAS PC. I really can't wrap my mind around how you are coming to this conclusion. The purpose of FreeNAS was to have an OS that could run on hardware that wasn't state of the art, be power conservative, provide excellent performance for the hardware used and be very reliable. Considering some of the FreeNAS servers use less than 150watts of power and have 40TB+ I can't believe you are going to find something equivalent to that elsewhere.

 

[Yoda]

Narann :
I don't go thru a router. My test environnement is just my 1st PC, just near the pc my 8 port Gb CISCO switch and just near the switch my Freenas PC. So, no other connection there ;)

noobsauce80 :
As written above, I don't use ZFS. If I need 6 or more Gb RAM for a "simple" use, so I would pay a lot more in hardware compare to buy a standard plug and play NAS.
Considering power consumption : When I have a look at the consumption of a standard NAS like Qnap or Synology I can't compare it to my freenas PC.

Anyway, looking at all this stuff on my PC (network chipset not supported for Gb, insuffisent RAM) I thnik I did the wrong choice.
I was looking for a simple OS for a NAS-PC, Freenas is maybe the right one, but not on my hardware and I don't have another one. So, I will have a look at other OS, If I cannot find one, I will the what I didn't want : selling my PC and buying a NAS.

Anyway, thanks for the help and advices.