Whats the biggest freeNAS ever built in terms of drives? and other Q's

[combat squirrel]

As title, whats the largest freeNAS ever built ? in terms of hard drives?

Also I run a freeNAS 8 box with 4 hard drives, although im a total noob at it I managed to get it working, currently running a JBOD as thats what suits my needs (1 large drive no redundancy), is it possible to add more drives and increase the '1 large drive pool' ? Or must i make a new partition ?

thanks, hello everyone btw 1st post :)

 

[sabreofsd]

Hmmm, I have a FreeNAS box that is using 12 drives, but FreeNAS sees them as 1 drive since the RAID controller is handling the RAID. I'm guessing there are much larger systems out there though.

 

[ZFSLover]

As title, whats the largest freeNAS ever built ? in terms of hard drives?

Also I run a freeNAS 8 box with 4 hard drives, although im a total noob at it I managed to get it working, currently running a JBOD as thats what suits my needs (1 large drive no redundancy), is it possible to add more drives and increase the '1 large drive pool' ? Or must i make a new partition ?

thanks, hello everyone btw 1st post :)

I have it running with 3 x 4U 24HDD JBODS, each JBOD has 24 x 1.5TB SATA HDD's, so that's 72 HDD's, on 9205-E and 9211-4i HBA cards.

It is a replication target for a NFS server.

 

[_Adrian_]

I'm just building mine up a bit now...
12 x 2TB WD RE4 7200 SATA drives in each HP MSA20 Dive shelf
Theres a total of 3 MSA20's right now all attached to a Smart Array 6404 with a 512Mb BBWC. Still room for 1 more
FreeNAS Box is a HP DL560 with 4x 3.6GHz Single Core Xeons and 12Gb RAM with 2x 36GB SCSI U320 in RAID0

Hooked up to 2 different Networks
Servers access the NAS through Infiniband ( 4x DDR - 10GB ) and the UI will be on the on-board LAN

 

[cyberjock]

One of my servers has 2 vdevs in 1 zpool, 8x1.5TB on RAIDZ2 and 8x1TB on RAIDZ2.

 

[ivorycruncher]

I would love to see how a build like this would perform on FreeNAS. O_O

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs

 

[cyberjock]

It wouldn't matter much at all.

The thumbdrive is loaded into RAM during bootup. Your bootups might be faster because FreeNAS would be loading into RAM from a very fast source, but its hard to beat the speed of a ramdrive. That's why buying a super fast(also expensive) USB 3.0 usb drive is pretty pointless. That 2 minute bootup won't be that big of a deal plus you ideally shouldn't be needing to bootup the server much.

Even of you ran ZFS on the SSDs, you'd still have the bottleneck at the NICs. Since the average zpool is capable of 2-3x or more of the theoretical output of a NIC, you'd still be suck with the "poor" speeds of Gb LAN.

 

[ivorycruncher]

Wow, I should know better than to post stuff right after waking up. From a NAS perspective, I suppose 2 GB/s is pretty pointless if you're only running gigabit ethernet, and I doubt many people are running 10-gig-e at home. Oh, and thanks for the tip about the USB 3.0 flash drive too. I wasn't sure if there would be any benefit to that or not. I suspect it may help load times of the web interface, but probably not enough to be all that noticeable.

 

[mstang1988]

I'm just building mine up a bit now...
12 x 2TB WD RE4 7200 SATA drives in each HP MSA20 Dive shelf
Theres a total of 3 MSA20's right now all attached to a Smart Array 6404 with a 512Mb BBWC. Still room for 1 more
FreeNAS Box is a HP DL560 with 4x 3.6GHz Single Core Xeons and 12Gb RAM with 2x 36GB SCSI U320 in RAID0

Hooked up to 2 different Networks
Servers access the NAS through Infiniband ( 4x DDR - 10GB ) and the UI will be on the on-board LAN

Umm, I didn't think freenas supported IB (or any RDMA for that matter). Am I wrong? If so *jumps for joy and sets up IB adapters*

 

[cyberjock]

The manual still says Infiniband, FibreChannel over Ethernet and wireless interfaces are not supported. So I don't know. I know of 2 people that would build FreeNAS servers now if there was a way to have speeds faster than Gb between server and 1 client machine if it wasn't 10Gb Ethernet. It is just so darn expensive!

 

[c6W@n^5PBuRJkV^K*vnJ!7b8E]

Even of you ran ZFS on the SSDs, you'd still have the bottleneck at the NICs. Since the average zpool is capable of 2-3x or more of the theoretical output of a NIC, you'd still be suck with the "poor" speeds of Gb LAN.

Who says you're limited to one NIC? Why not trunk (aka link aggregation) two or four NICs? Might as well setup jumbo frames, and you're good to go.

Obviously you'd need to maintain this setup from host to client, but that certainly can be done.

 

[cyberjock]

LA still limits the throughputs. You are limited to 1 NIC per connection. It has to do with the LA protocols. I've done some testing with LA and I was always disappointed when dealing with just a few heavy users. LA works well for 100s of users with 100s of connections. For 1-2 connections there really isn't much benefit.

 

[c6W@n^5PBuRJkV^K*vnJ!7b8E]

LA still limits the throughputs. You are limited to 1 NIC per connection. It has to do with the LA protocols. I've done some testing with LA and I was always disappointed when dealing with just a few heavy users. LA works well for 100s of users with 100s of connections. For 1-2 connections there really isn't much benefit.

Thanks for the input, it's good to know as I haven't directly tested in FreeNAS, but trunking worked great in OpenSolaris and ZFS.

Do you know if this is a FreeBSD inherited LA protocol issue or something introduced by the FreeNAS implementation? If I had to guess, it would be the former.

 

[cyberjock]

AFAIK The LA limitations are part of the network design and cannot be changed. Reading some posts on another forum some of the more knowledgeable people implied that the issue has no workaround because LA was designed to provide lots of bandwidth/redundnacy to alot of users, not allow 1 or 2 users to appear to have 2Gb NICs.

If you find any information to the contrary, I'd definitely like to read it, but AFAIK it's not OS dependent and you can't work around it.