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Sorry for all the dumb questions, but what's the word on Windows Home Server 2003 in its current state? I know they ran into a few data integrity issues a few years back, but supposedly that's all fixed with the Power Pack 1 upgrade. Looking to put WHS 2003 on a Core 2 with a bunch of drives, rather than (currently) waste a Sandy i5 with 2008 R2 running RAID. Any advice/experience is appreciated!
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Jul 27, 2012 04:31
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luigionlsd posted:Sorry for all the dumb questions, but what's the word on Windows Home Server 2003 in its current state? I know they ran into a few data integrity issues a few years back, but supposedly that's all fixed with the Power Pack 1 upgrade. Buy a bunch of RAM and use FreeNAS instead of a 9 year old abandoned OS.
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Jul 27, 2012 04:37
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DNova posted:Buy a bunch of RAM and use FreeNAS instead of a 9 year old abandoned OS. The box is a Core 2 Duo E6400 (2.13 GHz) and I have 4gb RAM. I guess FreeNAS would be okay but I'm a baby and like Microsoft products 
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Jul 27, 2012 04:42
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luigionlsd posted:The box is a Core 2 Duo E6400 (2.13 GHz) and I have 4gb RAM. I guess FreeNAS would be okay but I'm a baby and like Microsoft products The CPU is more than adequate. RAM might be ok. How big of an array do you want? FreeNAS is really easy to deal with.
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Jul 27, 2012 04:44
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DNova posted:The CPU is more than adequate. RAM might be ok. How big of an array do you want? FreeNAS is really easy to deal with. Honestly it's just 3x2TB drives now, one more down the line. Can I install the "OS" on a flash drive? How is it for expandability, for if I have 3 drives now, and 4 in the future? I messed around with FreeNAS on ESXi, but I'm not comfortable enough at the moment to really trust my data. If I can hook into AD and share my stuff that way, that's a plus.
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Jul 27, 2012 04:47
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DNova posted:Buy a bunch of RAM and use FreeNAS instead of a 9 year old abandoned OS.
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Jul 27, 2012 05:32
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Delta-Wye posted:I'm trying to debug what's going on with this last drive. Currently, everything in the NAS looks fine except I have one last 320GB drive I'd love to swap out. I've tried a couple different things with the 'bad' drive, including swapping it for one of the drives that seemed to work. The swap would /not/ go through and kept giving me arcane errors like: What kind of drive is it? Is it a Seagate 1.5 TB by any chance?
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Jul 27, 2012 06:28
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luigionlsd posted:Honestly it's just 3x2TB drives now, one more down the line. Can I install the "OS" on a flash drive? How is it for expandability, for if I have 3 drives now, and 4 in the future? FreeNAS prefers being installed on a flash drive. 4GB will do. You're OK on RAM for now with 3x2TB drives in RAIDZ1. You should buy another 2TB drive now and go with RAIDZ2 if you're the paranoid type. You'll want 8GB of RAM in that case. I understand fully about your trust issues. I'm kind of a Microsoft guy, too, but more and more getting away from them. ZFS is really good.
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Jul 27, 2012 06:46
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FISHMANPET posted:What kind of drive is it? Is it a Seagate 1.5 TB by any chance? the four new ones are WD Green 2TB EARX models. The ones generating read and write errors are on the same back plane, but I didn't have any trouble with that with the other two on the other controller.
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Jul 27, 2012 07:16
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DNova posted:FreeNAS prefers being installed on a flash drive. 4GB will do. You're OK on RAM for now with 3x2TB drives in RAIDZ1. You should buy another 2TB drive now and go with RAIDZ2 if you're the paranoid type. You'll want 8GB of RAM in that case. There is no reason to recommend so much ram for home usage. You only need crazy amounts of ram if you enable stuff like deduplication.
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Jul 27, 2012 09:08
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Longinus00 posted:There is no reason to recommend so much ram for home usage. luigionlsd posted:Honestly it's just 3x2TB drives now, one more down the line. *snip* How is it for expandability, for if I have 3 drives now, and 4 in the future? As for later expansion of pool, you can add more vdevs as needed (with any type of parity you want), or you can replace and resilver (rebuild the parity/data-integrity of the entire vdev) each drive in a vdev in order to expand the array once all drives have been replaced by bigger drives (autoexpand was added in v16, I believe, so if you're running v15 you need to export and re-import the pool manually). Look, I know it sounds scary - however it does provide robust data integrity compared to the way WHS does it (also note that WHS is abandoned as a project and there won't ever be another, and support + software updates will stop too in the not too distant future). If you really want to stick to Windows, buy Windows 8 as it includes ReFS in all versions. That way you get software parity on the zfs level, but on the Windows platform. Or hope that Microsoft releases a new WHS with ReFS, as some of us do, no matter how unlikely it seems. BlankSystemDaemon fucked around with this message at 12:27 on Jul 27, 2012 |
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Jul 27, 2012 12:09
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ReFS is only on Windows Server releases, not the consumer Windows releases.
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Jul 27, 2012 14:30
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luigionlsd posted:Honestly it's just 3x2TB drives now, one more down the line. Can I install the "OS" on a flash drive? How is it for expandability, for if I have 3 drives now, and 4 in the future?
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Jul 27, 2012 14:44
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D. Ebdrup posted:Wrong. 1GB of memory for every 1TB of diskspace on raidz1/2, up to a certain point. Besides, DDR3 memory is cheap as gently caress. No it's not wrong, go ahead and benchmark the effects of less than 1GB/TB of memory yourself. Besides, the person asking is going to install it in an old core 2 duo system so probably won't be able to use cheap rear end DDR3 memory.
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Jul 27, 2012 17:39
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Zorak of Michigan posted:ReFS is only on Windows Server releases, not the consumer Windows releases. Longinus00 posted:No it's not wrong, go ahead and benchmark the effects of less than 1GB/TB of memory yourself. Besides, the person asking is going to install it in an old core 2 duo system so probably won't be able to use cheap rear end DDR3 memory.
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Jul 27, 2012 18:05
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D. Ebdrup posted:I did do benchmarking when I first installed FreeNAS on my HP N36L, and came to the conclusion that it's a fine way to go. 4GB did suffer a bit, 2GB more so and 1GB (which the server came with) didn't work at all. See telling him instead that 4GB of memory will work fine and will only suffer "a bit" (although it would be more helpful if you gave some numbers so the other party doesn't have to rely on intangibles such as "a bit") is better than just flat out telling him get 8GB of memory. The reason 1GB of memory didn't work is that by default ARC wants to try to leave around 1GB free so is going to really be constrained if you just give it 1GB of total memory. The whole 1GB/1TB recommendation is tossed around all the time but is really excessive if the other person is not doing anything besides just serving files for typical home use. The best recommendation would be to have enough free ram that your ARC isn't getting starved in any way, 2GB dedicated to the ARC is probably enough for that to almost never happen in a home setting, but this require more technical knowledge on the part of the end user so the whole 1GB/1TB thing gets thrown around. If more people tried to run dedup/compression on their home freeNAS setups I'm sure there would be similar inappropriate recommendations for how much ram to use then too. This just annoys me because it perpetuates the myth that there's something magical about zfs that requires it to have ridiculous memory requirements compared to just about any other filesystem (actually there is but it's not so ridiculous as to require the whole 1GB/1TB ratio). Longinus00 fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Jul 27, 2012 |
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Jul 27, 2012 19:32
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I'm glad to hear that because I was looking at building a NAS and was kind of stressing over the motherboard I want supporting a max of 8 GB RAM. Lets say I want to play around with Windows Server 2012 when it comes out, would running FreeNAS or whatever in a VM within that be a complete poo poo show? Or I guess I'm more curious about running FreeNAS as a VM in general, not just as one in Server 2012. http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=15052729 What do yall think of this for a NAS btw? Ignore the 16 GB of RAM, I was toying with more RAM as people online are reporting that ASUS is stupid and the motherboard somehow supports 16 and not 8 GB max. Oh and I have a 550w PSU for it already. jmu fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Jul 27, 2012 |
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Jul 27, 2012 20:45
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DrDork posted:Alternately NAS4Free. It's a bit more mature, has a newer ZFS version, and is generally faster. Hmm, does it still run on a USB stick and, would I be able to "import" my zfs volumes from FreeNAS 8? (I'm not a fan of FreeNAS in its current form, honestly)
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Jul 27, 2012 22:40
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UndyingShadow posted:Hmm, does it still run on a USB stick and, would I be able to "import" my zfs volumes from FreeNAS 8? (I'm not a fan of FreeNAS in its current form, honestly)
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Jul 28, 2012 01:13
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UndyingShadow posted:Hmm, does it still run on a USB stick and, would I be able to "import" my zfs volumes from FreeNAS 8? (I'm not a fan of FreeNAS in its current form, honestly) I've been looking at NAS4Free for a while, and I'm going to (hopefully) make the switch this weekend. NAS4Free does have an embedded option for running from a USB stick or compact flash card. And yes, you should be able to import your ZFS volumes without any problems. Here's a quick howto from their forums, but it's basically do a 'zpool export $pool' on your FreeNAS install, install NAS4Free (preferably to a different USB stick) and configure networking, import your pool(s) from the GUI, and then set your shares and such back up. As long as you don't upgrade the zpool versions on your volumes, you should be able to switch back to FreeNAS without any problems. But once you do the zpool upgrade, you're committed to NAS4Free (or something else that supports zpool version 29). Edit: still working on getting stuff set back up, but the migration really was that simple. The only problem I ran into was getting the embedded image put on my USB stick. The NAS4Free docs recommend booting from the LiveCD and doing an install from there, but my server doesn't have an optical drive so that wasn't an option. Took me a bit to get physdiskwrite to cooperate, but after I got that sorted out it was smooth sailing. chizad fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Jul 28, 2012 |
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Jul 28, 2012 01:23
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I also had a bit of difficulty getting the embedded version to take on my USB stick. I eventually found this thread which worked on the first try. Only catch is it wasn't the latest version, so after I got it installed I had to upgrade, but that part was pretty painless and took all of 5 minutes. The only other catch I've run into is that CIFS/SMB has issues if you try to enable both SMB2 and AIO. But I'm still pretty happy so far--I went from ~40MB/s writes and ~60MB/s reads (which on some specific files would drop to more like 20/30 for some reason) on FreeNAS 8.2 to solid 75MB/s writes and 90MB/s reads on anything other than a mess of tiny files.
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Jul 28, 2012 14:38
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jmu posted:http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=15052729 Please don't pay that much for SATA cables. http://www.monoprice.com/products/search.asp?keyword=18%22+sata vvvvv For $8.76 you get 10 cables with postage, I don't think your math is correct. vvvvv Rukus fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Jul 29, 2012 |
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Jul 29, 2012 01:22
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But it's UV Blue, man! Also, while monoprice's cables do have rock-bottom prices, you'd lose any savings by paying shipping on just the one item. They're a good thing to throw into a future order, though, just to have some spares on hand.
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Jul 29, 2012 19:43
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I made the switch from FreeNAS to NAS4Free earlier this month, when the bugs in FreeNAS 8.2b4 were annoying me. It didn't really seem much better despite the changes in FreeBSD 9. SMB wasn't any faster unless I enabled SMB2+AIO (which is unstable), mt-daapd didn't work at all, I didn't have a need for any ZFS v28 features like de-dup, and an upgrade from .141 to .148 broke Transmission entirely and its config files permissions would get changed to --------- and gently caress everything up even if I deleted it. I just assumed the embedded version gets less testing, but then again they're all Nightly builds anyway. Ultimately once I realised I wanted to install few additional packages which would require creating a FreeBSD jail manually anyway, why not just use FreeNAS's plugin+jail setup anyway? YMMV, but in the end I just moved back to FreeNAS which by that point had become more stable with 8.2RC1 and 8.2-RELEASE dropping not long thereafter. DrDork posted:The only other catch I've run into is that CIFS/SMB has issues if you try to enable both SMB2 and AIO. That's actually covered in the NAS4Free README, but its hidden in the very bottom at the end of the changelog.  frumpsnake fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Jul 30, 2012 |
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Jul 30, 2012 00:29
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That sounds like a pretty lovely experience. By contrast, my speeds substantially increased (even without SMB2+AIO), Transmission worked fine from the get-go, and it all just worked better and faster than what I'd experienced under FreeNAS. If you're considering making the transition, the easy way is just to instal NAS4Free on a different USB stick and not upgrade the zpool to v28 when you import it. That way you can flop back and forth between OSes until you figure out which you like better.
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Jul 30, 2012 01:42
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I'm pretty unfamiliar with RAID. I currently have a RAID-0 setup across 2 drives, and want to transfer it over to a new computer I'm building, if I move the drives along with the RAID controller I have, will I lose my data?
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Jul 30, 2012 06:23
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Any reason to use FreeNAS versus Ubuntu + zfsonlinux if you don't need the GUI? I used FreeBSD earlier but driver bugs caused data corruption with some of my old Promise SATA controllers. I've been happy with ubuntu for years now, although I've been limited to LVM and mdraid arrays. I'm planning to build my new array as raidz2 with zfsonlinux, since it's been well behaved on the single disk zpool I've been testing it on so far. Since it's a straight port with just a solaris porting layer wrapping it, I don't think I should be worried about bugs that can cause data damage, right?
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Jul 30, 2012 06:38
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FreeNAS's biggest assets are the ease of setup and use. If neither of those are an issue for you, there's really no compelling reason to use it instead of a full-on OS like Ubuntu.
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Jul 30, 2012 07:08
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Longinus00 posted:See telling him instead that 4GB of memory will work fine and will only suffer "a bit" (although it would be more helpful if you gave some numbers so the other party doesn't have to rely on intangibles such as "a bit") is better than just flat out telling him get 8GB of memory. All this talk of RAM has me wondering what I should give my FreeNAS machine. I was planning on 8GB for a 10TB RAID-Z2 system that would hold system backups and HD video. Should I increase it to 10GB or more? If it matters, it's a VM with direct access to the drives, and has a 10Gb connection to the machines that will directly connect to it over iSCSI. Since I've only bought one drive so far (out of 6), I have plenty of time to re-think my strategy if necessary.
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Jul 30, 2012 14:58
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I've been lurking this thread for a number of months trying to figure out the best storage solution for my needs. Over time, I've slowly built up around 5.5TB of data that was stored on three separate 2TB drives in my Fractal R3 case (and daily system). The entire time I knew how potentially disastrous this storage setup was so I have been actively trying to find a solution that will give me at least 6TB with potential for expanding to much more, along with a host of other desirable features. I don't have any prior experience with RAID or setting up this large of a setup so I wanted to use a product that would allow for ease-of-use and narrowed it down to basically Drobo or Synology. I could have done this for cheaper, however, I don't think I would've had as easy of a setup. I went with the Synology DS1812+ (with a 10% discount from Newegg) that gives me 8 bays and access to the Synology DSM 4.0 software. The unbox and setup was extremely easy, the only difficulty being screwing in the hard drives into their mounts. I plugged in the DS1812+ into my Trendnet TEG-S16DG managed through my Linksys E3000. After installing the Synology Assistant on my MBP (they provide both OS X & Windows installs on their CD), it was able to quickly detect the DS1812+ and begin the DSM installation process, which only took ~10-15 minutes. After that, I was able to log in to the box at synology:5000 (useful!) and easily begin navigating their GUI. The hard drives were essentially immediately able to be used and I added a couple of the pre-supplied packages such as a VPN, Media, and iTunes servers. In the end, it was a pretty smooth setup and although a bit expensive, it really suited my needs perfectly and any qualms I had about switching to a networked solution were immediately dismissed when I started getting 80-100MB/s transfer speeds over my network. I definitely recommend the Synology line of products to anyone that is looking for the same type of setup and features as I was. long-edit: can anyone with experience setting up a Synology NAS product shoot me a PM? I have some questions about setting up some of the packages, specifically the iTunes and VPN servers- thanks. dox fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Aug 1, 2012 |
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Jul 30, 2012 21:01
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That looks like a pretty sweet NAS, I would totally love to have so much expansion, too bad I can't afford it though. 
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Jul 30, 2012 22:04
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shifty posted:All this talk of RAM has me wondering what I should give my FreeNAS machine. I was planning on 8GB for a 10TB RAID-Z2 system that would hold system backups and HD video. Should I increase it to 10GB or more? If it matters, it's a VM with direct access to the drives, and has a 10Gb connection to the machines that will directly connect to it over iSCSI. If you read my post I'm pretty sure I mention that total memory amount is not important, the amount of memory available to the ARC and your workload is. For example here is a sample situation, suppose you mainly transfer large files and the mean time between reading/writing the same file is relatively high (say you're serving movies/tv shows/backups from your NAS and you don't watch the same movie/show repeatedly very often or have to restore backups very often) your ARC is 10GB and your miss rate is 98%. How much more cache do you need to see a substantial improvement in performance? How much cache can you remove without any ill effects?
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Jul 30, 2012 22:24
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PlasticSpoon posted:I'm pretty unfamiliar with RAID.
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Jul 30, 2012 23:11
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Rukus posted:Please don't pay that much for SATA cables. http://www.monoprice.com/products/search.asp?keyword=18%22+sata Heh I threw those on there because I'm buying all this stuff on credit from Newegg because I'm an idiot (and still owe them for the workstation I built earlier this year).
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Jul 31, 2012 01:37
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Longinus00 posted:If you read my post I'm pretty sure I mention that total memory amount is not important, the amount of memory available to the ARC and your workload is. For example here is a sample situation, suppose you mainly transfer large files and the mean time between reading/writing the same file is relatively high (say you're serving movies/tv shows/backups from your NAS and you don't watch the same movie/show repeatedly very often or have to restore backups very often) your ARC is 10GB and your miss rate is 98%. How much more cache do you need to see a substantial improvement in performance? How much cache can you remove without any ill effects? I think I understand a bit more now, thanks. I'm assuming that as a home user with a relatively small workload I should be able to keep settings at default. With that in mind, how do I determine the best amount of RAM? Do I just start with a low number, start recording video to it, and monitor the GUI's reporting tab? I have about 20GB to play with, so I'd be able to bump it up or down rather easily. It would be awesome if I could leave extra RAM for other machines though. I tried looking at arcstat, but I couldn't see anything interesting with it. Part of that might be the system being idle for the past week, but I also have no clue what to look for. Also, in your scenario, wouldn't watching a movie cause read-ahead caching? Does that not use the same RAM as ARC, or am I misinterpreting read-ahead altogether? Though, admittedly, I'm much more concerned with write performance than I am with read performance. I'm trying to avoid a write stall while a TV show or movie is recording.
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Jul 31, 2012 19:28
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shifty posted:I think I understand a bit more now, thanks. I'm assuming that as a home user with a relatively small workload I should be able to keep settings at default. With that in mind, how do I determine the best amount of RAM? Do I just start with a low number, start recording video to it, and monitor the GUI's reporting tab? I have about 20GB to play with, so I'd be able to bump it up or down rather easily. It would be awesome if I could leave extra RAM for other machines though. There are better tools for examining your ARC usage over long timescales such as this. http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=979 With some googling you can find more and these are all written in perl so you should be able to extend/incorporate them into whatever you want. As far as read-ahead caching is concerned I believe you're thinking about buffering. Assuming you're playing bluray rips, you're going to see a peek transfer rate of about 40Mbps. Hard drives are about an order of magnitude faster than that so even with minimal buffering you shouldn't have to worry about it very much barring excessive seeks due to fragmentation. If you know how much write bandwidth your streaming/recording will use you can figure out how much buffering you will need at a minimum to avoid write stalls. If you're going to be playing/writing compressed video recordings I can't imagine that you'll need a huge ARC to keep everything running smoothly (HDTV DVRs can record and play multiple hdtv streams at a time with only 64-128MB or so of ram total). Your usage description is still kind of vague to me but you should be able to get by with fairly little memory dedicated to the ARC so long as you're basically just streaming files larger than your total memory. Obviously you should try it out and also readjust if your workload changes (e.g. you decide to start serving some databases off of your zfs share).
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Jul 31, 2012 23:01
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Guess what showed up in the mail today! Finally i can ditch all my JBOD LVM filesystems and instead place all of my eggs in one (fairly well protected) basket code:Time to order an USB desktop dock and use those old wd greens as backup cartridges 
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Aug 1, 2012 11:21
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I'm building a new home server that I'm hoping to use with esxi, with VMs for a file server, HTPC, linux dev box, etc Ivy Bridge Core i5 / Intel Z77 Chipset / 16GB RAM / 128GB Samsung SSD 830 / undecided on storage drives For my ZFS stoage I'm torn between using OpenIndiana and Linux, I thought OI would be better for ZFS but it seems Linux ZFS has come a long way! I'd rather avoid freebsd if possible. Any suggestions there? I also have a single SSD, I want to use it to store OS images for esxi but it'll have a lot of free space so I'm thinking about partitioning it for L2ARC. Though with up to 16GB of RAM would this even be used? I don't think I'm going to bother using Dedup given the apparent performance hit. I'm more concerned with read speed than write speed, I guess I could add another SSD later for ZIL if I need better write performance, but for now it's mainly going to be serving media files over the network. Gism0 fucked around with this message at 13:49 on Aug 1, 2012 |
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Aug 1, 2012 13:43
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Longinus00 posted:There are better tools for examining your ARC usage over long timescales such as this. Thanks, that makes me feel better. I'll start low and monitor during testing. As for my usage description, I have an ESXi 5 machine hosting the FreeNAS(with direct access to RAW drives), a Windows 7 machine for Media Center, a Windows Home Server 2011, and a test lab. The 3 machines are configured at the highest priority, so the test lab won't take any necessary resources from them. The network connection between the 3 is 10Gb, and the connection to the physical network is 1Gb. They all currently share the same external NIC, but that will change to 3 or 4 teamed NICs soon. The NAS isn't that important yet because TV shows record on Windows 7 on its own drive, and gets copied over to the Windows Home Server using TV Archive. I haven't started copying my movies over yet. I'm waiting until I get all 6 of my 3TB hard drives and FreeNAS stable. When Server 2012 Essentials comes out, I want to transition to that for its domain capabilities, but I'll lose the TV Archive piece. This is when the NAS becomes important(to me). To keep my recorded TV on redundant disks, I want to use FreeNAS in RAID-Z2 for a 1.5TB iSCSI (for recorded shows and system backups) and the remaining space as CIFS for movies. I'm using the iSCSI since Media Center can't record to a network share, and it looks like system backup will be the same way. Highest usage scenario: recording 3 shows + streaming 2 videos during a system backup. That should be very rare though, typical usage would be more like streaming 1 video and recording 2. If I'm overlooking a better way to do all of this, I'm definitely open to suggestions.
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Aug 1, 2012 14:13
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Gism0 posted:I'm building a new home server that I'm hoping to use with esxi, with VMs for a file server, HTPC, linux dev box, etc There is nothing that L2ARC will help you with, considering your workload, other than shortening the life of your SSD. shifty posted:Thanks, that makes me feel better. I'll start low and monitor during testing. You're still missing the most important information, how much bandwidth those video streams require. Considering you're only allocating 1.5TB for it I'm guessing your saving compressed files. I assume you making one big z2 pool with all your disks and then making a subvolume for the iSCSI target?
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Aug 1, 2012 22:12
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