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Posts Only Secrets posted:That's not true. I did the same thing with our current setup infact. Just setup the bios to not halt on any errors. Our usage went from 110 watts with the video card, to 65-70 without it. I even kept the card in the bottom of the case in a static bag, just in case we need to do something locally with the server. If you ever need to do something with the PC, just power it down and pop the card back in. Booting without a videocard even with the halt trick isn't guaranteed.
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# ? Sep 27, 2011 03:45 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 01:02 |
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Longinus00 posted:Booting without a videocard even with the halt trick isn't guaranteed. A lot of BIOS's will absolutely refuse to boot if they cannot find a video option ROM/BIOS to load. For instance the current branch of AMI UEFI BIOSs ship from AMI without the ability to boot without a video device.
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# ? Sep 27, 2011 04:18 |
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Galler posted:Here's my post about my microserver: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2801557&userid=131294#post393875749 Thanks for this. I think I'm going to go ahead and get the Microserver; it should suit my needs just fine. For a while there I got sucked in by some HardOCP posts on the subject, started geeking out, and was getting ready to spend £500 (not including drives) on a bunch of components for an overly powerful FreeNAS box. Basically, completely over-engineering the problem, relative to my requirements. I hate it when I do that.
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# ? Sep 27, 2011 08:08 |
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As a proud owner of a HP microserver, I guarentee you will not be dissapointed. Everything works great and its seriously small (about same width ad a ps3 but double in height) The thing even runs win 7 fine out of the box. I'm considering getting another when I can to run as a secondary backup.
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# ? Sep 27, 2011 09:01 |
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Looking at the Microserver, Since it has x4 3.5" HD Slots i'm not sure what my "best" option is going to be. x4 3TB Drives, at RaidZ1, for 9TB Usable, 1 disk worth of failure. x4 3TB Drives, at RAidZ2, for 6TB Usable, 2 disk worth of failure. x4 2TB Drives, at RaidZ1, for 6TB Usable, 1 disk worth of failure. Of the 3 options 1 and 2 are the most appealing to me. How bad of an idea would it be to run Option #1? All of this data is backed up so it's mostly just me trying to get an extra 3TB of room. If this is a terrible idea then i'll probably go with the RaidZ2.
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# ? Sep 27, 2011 13:28 |
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^^^ just fyi the actual usable space for 4x2tb raidz1 will be a bit under 5tb due to the way drive capacity is sold. moron posted:Thanks for this. I think I'm going to go ahead and get the Microserver; it should suit my needs just fine. Oh and hp came out with a new version of the microserver (n40l - n36l is the previous version) which has a slightly faster processor. I don't know if the bios flash to "unlock" the optical drive sata port will work on the new version (probably not) or if there's a new version of that bios. Galler fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Sep 27, 2011 |
# ? Sep 27, 2011 15:15 |
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GobiasIndustries posted:Also, if/when I decide to up the number of drives in the system, what's a decent expander card to look at? I've been streaming 720p/1080p files just fine from my desktop to laptop wirelessly for a while now, so really all I'm looking for is the extra ports. Also, keep in mind the 8-port card is PCIe x8, so make sure you have an x8 or x16 slot available. I had to hunt down a cheap PCI Video card so I could hook the card up to the x16 slot I had a video card in. Also, this card is SAS, so you'd probably need one or two of these breakout cables (or these if your case has SAS connectors.)
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# ? Sep 27, 2011 19:51 |
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Steampunk Hitler posted:Looking at the Microserver, Since it has x4 3.5" HD Slots i'm not sure what my "best" option is going to be. Its been said in the thread before but there is an extra sata port and a 5.25inch drive bay on top that you can utilize to turn those raids into 5x drive raids if that floats your boat. (It should!)
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# ? Sep 28, 2011 00:07 |
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I am looking for a NAS which supports the following: 5 drives Raid 6 no common reports of data loss (drobo) whatever is needed to watch media from a PS3 ideally I could also stream to computers if it can run any other apps it would be a plus, but not needed. quiet as cheap as possible. Any suggestions? So far I have looked at the HP MicroServer which is nice, but only 4 drive capacity, and I don't really want to hack it to access the optical sata port. I have also looked at the Synology offerings, but they seem to jump to $700+ for a 5 bay.
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# ? Sep 28, 2011 00:27 |
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I am confused. I bought a SASUC8I card and flashed it with the 3081E-R firmware. In both the stock and flashed with IT firmware configuration the card will not detect the Hitachi 5K3000 drive I have hooked up to it. Edit: Apparently I bought the wrong kind of cables. I just swapped the SFF cable from my desktop's raid card onto the SASUC8I and now it detects a drive. It appears to be the same cable type as the others though the marking is slightly different. The cable that works is a 79576-3003 and the one that doesnt is a 79576-3002 Goon Matchmaker fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Sep 28, 2011 |
# ? Sep 28, 2011 00:49 |
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Goon Matchmaker posted:I am confused. I bought a SASUC8I card and flashed it with the 3081E-R firmware. In both the stock and flashed with IT firmware configuration the card will not detect the Hitachi 5K3000 drive I have hooked up to it. Yes there are different types of those cable, straight-thru and crossover. Have to be careful which one you pick! FYI, I don't think the 1068E controllers support drives over 2TB in size.
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# ? Sep 28, 2011 01:50 |
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I thought the distinction for SFF-8087 connectors was forward v. reverse cables rather than straight/through v. crossover (aka Ethernet cabling)
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# ? Sep 28, 2011 02:12 |
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movax posted:Yes there are different types of those cable, straight-thru and crossover. Have to be careful which one you pick! FYI, I don't think the 1068E controllers support drives over 2TB in size. Edit: I need a forward breakout cable. I'm going to pick up two from Monoprice. Thanks guys! Goon Matchmaker fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Sep 28, 2011 |
# ? Sep 28, 2011 02:25 |
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atomjack posted:Depending on how many ports you want, and what kind of PCI Express slots you have available, I'd recommend either this 4-port PCIe x1 card, or this 2 SAS-port (up to 8 devices) PCIe x8 card. If anyone is in the market for an 8-port card that supports 3TB drives, the IBM M1015 is an OEM LSI card and can be easily flashed into a nice JBOD/IT mode card. They're usually pretty cheap on eBay. I'll report back when I brick mine!
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# ? Sep 28, 2011 06:11 |
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Puddin posted:Its been said in the thread before but there is an extra sata port and a 5.25inch drive bay on top that you can utilize to turn those raids into 5x drive raids if that floats your boat. (It should!) Planning on using that for my OS Drive
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# ? Sep 28, 2011 08:32 |
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Steampunk Hitler posted:Planning on using that for my OS Drive Pssst, There is also a 2.5 inch drive underneath the 5.25 which you can snake the eSata through the back for that purpose.
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# ? Sep 28, 2011 11:19 |
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necrobobsledder posted:I thought the distinction for SFF-8087 connectors was forward v. reverse cables rather than straight/through v. crossover (aka Ethernet cabling) Yeah, that's what it was, oops. I remember coming across that when picking up the cables for my controllers.
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# ? Sep 28, 2011 14:56 |
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I had a 8-disk RAID-6 array built using mdadm. I then moved half way around the world. Now I've got a brand new machine, brand new ubuntu install, and my old disks. Only one of the disks has 'gone missing' so to speak. It used to have a single partition that the array sat on, but now it doesn't. code:
code:
Now, this is where I'm stuck. How do I safely add my two new disks as spares, flag the missing /dev/sdb1 as failed, and then get the system to bring the array to a healthy state? [edit] Also, Is there a way to copy the partition size from my old disks to my new disks? Both my old and new disks (WD20EARS-XXXX) are the same model and have the same sector count, yet I can't get parted or gparted to create new partitions that match the sector start and ends of my old disks. [edit2] All sorted. It appears the disk was already removed, so I just had to update the metadata and then add the new disk. Horse Clocks fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Sep 28, 2011 |
# ? Sep 28, 2011 18:50 |
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I'm also running freenas 8 on a microserver, 5 2tb drives in raidz-1 and a usb stick for the OS. There are a few things to look out for if you really want to push gigabit transfer rates over smb, though (setting up 4k sector drives correctly, smb tweaks, kernel tcp/ip tweaks). Also try to set up everything up *exactly* the way you want it before you start dumping data on it, you can't grow zfs vdevs or convert it to raidz2.
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# ? Sep 29, 2011 06:37 |
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Evilkiksass posted:So far I have looked at the HP MicroServer which is nice, but only 4 drive capacity, and I don't really want to hack it to access the optical sata port. I have also looked at the Synology offerings, but they seem to jump to $700+ for a 5 bay. With the MicroServer, the "hack" is a bios update to allow it to run at full SATA speed on that port. The default firmware gimps the fifth port for some silly reason and the update just unlocks it. If you don't want to do that, you can easily add in an 8 port raid card and run the drives off of that. My test server at the moment is running 6x3TB (4 normal slots and 2 in the 5" bay using a Nexus Double Twin) in Raid 6 via an Adaptec 3805 card with the OS being run off of a 2.5" drive from the onboard ports. Yes, I know that the 3TB's are overkill for a test server, but I got them at half price from someone selling off his microserver.
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# ? Sep 29, 2011 11:11 |
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Thought I'd stop in and say something after spending all week playing with hard drives. For my birthday in July of 2007, my dad bought me the very first generation drobo. I took the mini back to college with me, and plugged it into the mac mini in my living room. Over the years, I filled it up with a fairly large library of movies ripped from DVDs and then an even larger library of Blueray rips, and my fellow housemates and I have used it as a wireless time machine destination for 4 laptops. We came within 200gb of the maximum storage of the device the weekend before last, and I used some of the money I made over the summer to buy a drobo fs and each of my housemates bought a drive. I set everything up sunday and started transferring data. The new drobo is sitting in a closet in my basement, wired directly to the router, instead of plugged in under our TV. The data transfer finished this morning, I did some check's to make sure the transfer was good and everything's been working great across the network: time machine backups, mini is a plea server, etc. I know some people have experienced data loss with drobos, and they are a little pricey, but in my experience, it's been a champion. It survived 2 unintended drive failures and 8 intentional when I upgraded drives.
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# ? Sep 29, 2011 12:07 |
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heeen posted:I'm also running freenas 8 on a microserver, 5 2tb drives in raidz-1 and a usb stick for the OS. There are a few things to look out for if you really want to push gigabit transfer rates over smb, though (setting up 4k sector drives correctly, smb tweaks, kernel tcp/ip tweaks). Mind sharing what you tweaked exactly?
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# ? Sep 29, 2011 17:27 |
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PraxxisParadoX posted:Mind sharing what you tweaked exactly? Seconded. I get awful SMB performance on FBSD8. I'm running a CURRENT build so it may just be buggy but it's pretty bad. EDIT: This could also be my wireless router or Lion's fault too so I'm not sure.
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# ? Sep 29, 2011 17:32 |
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LamoTheKid posted:Seconded. I get awful SMB performance on FBSD8. I'm running a CURRENT build so it may just be buggy but it's pretty bad. SMB under FBSD has always been bad. When I was building my first NAS and still had a hardon for FBSD, I spent hours tweaking things to try to get more than 15MB/s out of the machine. I eventually gave up and installed Linux. I went from 15MB/s to being able to max out a gig-e link and that was before tuning.
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# ? Sep 29, 2011 18:05 |
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Goon Matchmaker posted:SMB under FBSD has always been bad. When I was building my first NAS and still had a hardon for FBSD, I spent hours tweaking things to try to get more than 15MB/s out of the machine. I eventually gave up and installed Linux. I went from 15MB/s to being able to max out a gig-e link and that was before tuning. I went with FBSD for native ZFS and a stable ports branch (OpenIndiana is awful if you want to do more with it than run a NAS). loving rtorrent crashes constantly on OI/Nexenta using both the pkg install and compiling with the Solaris patches.
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# ? Sep 29, 2011 18:15 |
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I finally pieced together a computer for my photographer friend's storage needs. It will be running FreeNAS 8, using ZFS RAID-Z. I'm hoping to get 50Mbps+ on LAN through AFP. Here are the pieces: Fractal Design Arc Midi Black High Performance PC Computer Case w/ USB 3.0 and 3 x Fractal High Performance 140mm fans http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811352007 Antec EarthWatts Series EA-750 Green 750W ATX12V http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371051 Thermaltake Silent 1156 CLP0552 92mm CPU Cooler For Intel Socket LGA1156 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835106139 BIOSTAR T5 XE CFX-SLI LGA 1156 Intel P55 ATX Intel Motherboard http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138162 Intel Core i3-540 Clarkdale 3.06GHz LGA 1156 73W Dual-Core http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115221 Adaptec RAID 1430SA 2240900-R SATAII PCI Express x4, 4 ports Controller Card, Kit http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816103058 2 - G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231314 10 - HITACHI Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3020ALA632 (0F12117) 2TB SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145475 Does this look like a good setup? I will be running FreeNAS off a 4GB Patriot usb thumb drive. This pretty much maxes out the space inside the case, so if he needs additional storage he will have to get another machine.
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# ? Sep 29, 2011 23:36 |
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I am in charge of buying a new data server for a relatively small (~10 user) research group. I have a budget of about $3000, and we are going to need about 16TB on a RAID 5/6 system. From looking through this thread, and looking around online, I have found a couple of possibilities, but I was wondering if any of you could give me some input/suggestions. This is my first time making this kind of decision alone, and I have no experience in NAS hardware, so I'd like to have input from folks more knowledgeable than I. I have only looked at a few company's products. If I don't get a response from this thread, I will most likely go with either the qnap-ts-879 or a Buffalo Terastation Pro 8. Is one better than the other? What other alternatives should I look into?
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# ? Sep 30, 2011 03:10 |
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Rusty Kettle posted:I am in charge of buying a new data server for a relatively small (~10 user) research group. I have a budget of about $3000, and we are going to need about 16TB on a RAID 5/6 system. The "haven't done this before" part is worrying, but I don't know if $3000 is enough for a commercial 16TB system. That one you linked cannot give you 16TB of RAID5/6 without moving up to 3TB drives, for instance. Maybe look at buying a bare Netgear ReadyNAS or something and then feeding it drives. Is this just used to hold datasets/results? How many simultaneous clients? Large files that are streamed slowly, or lots of little files (i.e. need IOPS)
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# ? Sep 30, 2011 03:48 |
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movax posted:The "haven't done this before" part is worrying, but I don't know if $3000 is enough for a commercial 16TB system. That one you linked cannot give you 16TB of RAID5/6 without moving up to 3TB drives, for instance. Maybe look at buying a bare Netgear ReadyNAS or something and then feeding it drives. It will be rare that there will be more than 2-3 simultaneous clients. I/O will be primarily datasets from imaging (many ~6mb images), and various databases used in computational modeling (5-10GB). The databases can be moved to a local cluster for modeling, and don't need to be moved often. Pointing the model to read from the server would be convenient, but it would slow down the simulation a lot, I imagine. The $3000 figure was the maximum I could squeeze out. We recently had lots of expensive lab equipment failure, so I'm lucky to get that much. I'll look into that Netgear ReadyNAS.
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# ? Sep 30, 2011 04:12 |
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Rusty Kettle posted:I have only looked at a few company's products. If I don't get a response from this thread, I will most likely go with either the qnap-ts-879 or a Buffalo Terastation Pro 8. At work we have 4 QNAP TS-809U-RP. For lower tiered large slow storage, they have been working great. We originally grabbed a few to use for VMWare storage using iSCSI, but were not getting good enough performance out of them for what we wanted (someone else on this forum has the same ones and is getting much better performance, could be a misconfiguration on my end). As for reliability, have not really had any problems. About a month ago I noticed one of the arrays (8x1tb Raid 5) had dropped a disk. The system was showing that there was no disk in there. Swapped the disk, array rebuilt fine, everything was good. No downtime from the system. I ran a few tests on the disk that dropped and it seemed fine. Decided to throw it back into the array (in the same bay that it was reporting dead in), came back online fine, rebuilt the array, still chugging. As with anything important, use multiple backups. For some cheap, non I/O intensive storage, I really cannot complain.
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# ? Sep 30, 2011 05:22 |
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I've just had my Microserver and five harddrives delivered. Not had a chance to turn it on and try it out so far (forgot that I don't have a VGA to DVI connector...drat), but planning on setting it up tomorrow. Just to clarify, does ZFS allow me to increase the size of the array? I read somewhere that you can expand it by pulling the drives out one at a time, putting in a bigger one, waiting for the array to rebuild, then doing the next drive etc, until all the drives have been replaced. Is this true?
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# ? Sep 30, 2011 19:15 |
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moron posted:Just to clarify, does ZFS allow me to increase the size of the array? I read somewhere that you can expand it by pulling the drives out one at a time, putting in a bigger one, waiting for the array to rebuild, then doing the next drive etc, until all the drives have been replaced. Is this true? That is resilvering; it'll let you replace the drives in a vdev. Generally though, you should add whole new vdevs at a time. For example, my functional unit is 6-drive RAID-Z2 w/ 2TB drives. I added six new drives at a time to the pool, and it is currently comprised of three 6-drive RAID-Z2 vdevs.
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# ? Sep 30, 2011 20:10 |
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I suspect I'm doing something retarded. I'm running Ubuntu (hahahahhaha) with native ZFS. I'm not seeing any way to configure the size of the arc cache. I've made some adjustments on boot so vmalloc complains a lot less but this is still biting me in the rear end. I'll probably end up grabbing another 4-8GB of memory, but I'd like to be able to resolve this as-is. I see nothing via zfs set/get other than setting what gets cached of on/off/metadata.
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# ? Oct 1, 2011 03:19 |
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Moey posted:At work we have 4 QNAP TS-809U-RP. For lower tiered large slow storage, they have been working great. We originally grabbed a few to use for VMWare storage using iSCSI, but were not getting good enough performance out of them for what we wanted (someone else on this forum has the same ones and is getting much better performance, could be a misconfiguration on my end). As for reliability, have not really had any problems. About a month ago I noticed one of the arrays (8x1tb Raid 5) had dropped a disk. The system was showing that there was no disk in there. Swapped the disk, array rebuilt fine, everything was good. No downtime from the system. I ran a few tests on the disk that dropped and it seemed fine. Decided to throw it back into the array (in the same bay that it was reporting dead in), came back online fine, rebuilt the array, still chugging. That was me. I have two of the TS-809U-RP's and they've worked great for my purposes so far, although my usage is slightly atypical. I am using them as iSCSI targets for our backup server to store backups on, the primary one essentially replicating to the secondary located off-site. Performing just that one function by one server it works great (110+MB/sec). I'm about to add some lower tier file shares to it now as well since the usage hours are completely opposite for those two functions. The only hiccup I had was with the 3tb drives. Out of the box the units had an older firmware that didn't support my drives, so I needed to scrounge up a smaller disk for the initial setup and firmware flash.
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# ? Oct 1, 2011 05:09 |
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I'm looking for a hand with ZFS sharing. I'm not sure if this is possible, but I'm trying to make some shares like this: tank/media shared via NFS tank/media/video shared via SMB tank/media/audio shared via SMB Right now I just have tank/media shared via both NFS and SMB and it works fine, but I'd like to have individual video and audio SMB shares to only expose relevant data to applications. Would I need to make nested datasets/filesystems to make this happen? If so, is it possible to move data instantly from a parent dataset into a nested dataset?
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# ? Oct 1, 2011 22:06 |
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BnT posted:Would I need to make nested datasets/filesystems to make this happen? If so, is it possible to move data instantly from a parent dataset into a nested dataset? You'll have to create sub-datasets and move the data manually. I'd mv the audio and video directories to audio.old and video.old before creating the datasets or it might mount empty directories over the video and audio directories.
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# ? Oct 2, 2011 00:12 |
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BnT posted:I'm looking for a hand with ZFS sharing. I'm not sure if this is possible, but I'm trying to make some shares like this: Samba doesn't care if it's zfs or minixfs. Delete SMB root share in smb.conf, add 2 new shares. Caveat: it's been years since I've touched samba.
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# ? Oct 2, 2011 00:59 |
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a child dataset won't show up under the parents cifs share, and transfers will not be instantaneous via mapped drive.
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# ? Oct 2, 2011 01:57 |
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karoshi posted:Samba doesn't care if it's zfs or minixfs. Delete SMB root share in smb.conf, add 2 new shares. Caveat: it's been years since I've touched samba. Solaris has CIFS built into the kernel, so we're talking about a ZFS property, not smb.conf.
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# ? Oct 2, 2011 05:16 |
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# ? May 15, 2024 01:02 |
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Finally got Microserver up and running. So far, it's absolutely great. I decided to go with FreeNAS 8 in the end, and it was ridiculously simple to set up. How often do you guys run S.M.A.R.T checks on your disks? And what sort of tests do you run? I want to keep a close eye on the health of the drives, but I don't want to get all OCD about it or over-stress the disks by running needless tests etc.
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# ? Oct 2, 2011 09:40 |