FreeNAS Questions

[vdub12]

I am in the process of building a FreeNAS server and had a few questions for people that have already built one. I am trying to build the system on the cheap and have all my money invested in to drives. The system specks follow.

Slot1 PIII 550Mhz
256Mb PC133
40Gb Primary drive. For OS
4X Hitachi 5K3000 2Tb Drives 512k sectors
SLI 3114 4 port raid controller
3x5.25 to 4x3.5 hotswapable backplain

I normally use WD drives but the research I did said that there inability to enable TLER made them a bad choice for hardware raid. However, I plan to run a software raid but ether way I read many people where having trouble with the advanced format 4k drives. Many people where forced to run them in ZFS and I would like to keep the filesystem UFS. The Hitachi's support TLER and are 512k sectors so I figured they where the best choice. However, I went though the Hitachi 75GXP fiasco and swore I would never use a Hitachi drive again. I had 5 or 6 of them and they all died from the famous click of death. I am hoping I didn't make a stupid choice here.

Finally I am wondering if the PIII 550Mhz is going to be able to handle the raid 5 I plan to use on this system. There are going to be 4 or 5 systems backing up to this nas. I can always upgrade the hardware if needed. I was thinking if this doesn't work I would upgrade it to a 3Ghz Sempron with 1Gb of ram if I have to. But I would rather stay with the PIII if possible.

I am kind of excited to get this system up and running. I preach to my customers every day the importance of backing up and I have no backup myself. Believe me it keeps me up and night sometimes because I have had hard drive failures. Luckily I have always gotten lucky and found a way to recover them.

 

[thebige]

I could be completely wrong about this but are you going to need a BBWC to run a RAID5?

 

[vdub12]

This is going to be a software raid that I plan to let FreeNAS maintain. From everything I have read its better to let FreeNAS maintain the raid because you can migrate to other hardware without breaking the array.

When I first started this project I created a FreeNAS VM with 4x20Gb virtual drives in a raid 5 and it worked great. When I built it was just to get familiar with FreeNAS.

I am not building this system for performance, just backup. The backups will happen at idle time and after the initial sync they will not be very taxing. The system will eventually run headless under my workbench. I want to use solid hardware for reliability thats why I have opted for the old PIII. However, some of the tests I have seen with a raid 5 in FreeNAS tax even a dual core AMD so I am worried about it being to slow. From the tests I have done so far a sync puts CPU usage at about 80% with a single drive with no array. I ordered my drives last night so when they come in I will try it. I just don't want it to take a week to build the array.

 

[vdub12]

Update:

The PIII didn't work out. The system had problems managing memory. It had constant kernel panics. I swapped it out for a 2.4Ghz P4 Celeron and its running a lot better. I decided to use FreeNAS 8 and I went with a ZFS raid. Because of that I think the 512Mb of ram I am using isn't enough. I am more then likely going to replace one of the 256 with a 1Gb stick.

I am a little disappointed in the transfer rate. My Linux box is copying files over at about 4Mb/s. That might be because of the low ram. The PIII could only hit 2.5Mb/s. For the most part its running great though.

 

[14049752]

Update:

The PIII didn't work out. The system had problems managing memory. It had constant kernel panics. I swapped it out for a 2.4Ghz P4 Celeron and its running a lot better. I decided to use FreeNAS 8 and I went with a ZFS raid. Because of that I think the 512Mb of ram I am using isn't enough. I am more then likely going to replace one of the 256 with a 1Gb stick.

I am a little disappointed in the transfer rate. My Linux box is copying files over at about 4Mb/s. That might be because of the low ram. The PIII could only hit 2.5Mb/s. For the most part its running great though.

I've had a lot of problems with transfer rates as well. Mostly, I've read that it's issues with hardware compatibility. If you stick within the strict confines of the supported/recommended hardware, supposedly it works really well. I like FreeNAS as far as what it is and does, but it's too picky for me...I've just started using xubuntu and stripping it away to its core, instead.

 

[dbdawn]

I have been following this thread on another forum. ZFSguru NAS fileserver project

 

[vdub12]

I've had a lot of problems with transfer rates as well. Mostly, I've read that it's issues with hardware compatibility. If you stick within the strict confines of the supported/recommended hardware, supposedly it works really well. I like FreeNAS as far as what it is and does, but it's too picky for me...I've just started using xubuntu and stripping it away to its core, instead.

I am thinking about switching to a Linux based NAS server. The BSD based is honestly driving me crazy. I have been able to increase the transfer rates to 5.9Mb/s by tweaking it. However, I can transfer between my Windows xp bench computer to my OpenSUSE workstation at 8+ Mb/s on the exact same network using the exact same transfer method, cifs/smb and rsync. And thats with absolutely no tweaking. I am sure if I tried I could get close to the 12Mb/s limit on 10/00.

To increase the transfer rates I have changed to FreeNAS 7 rather then the 8 RC5 beta. I also am using a raid 5 rather then a ZFS pool now. I have also added another NIC and enabled link aggression. So far 5.9Mb/s is the best I can do. I don't think network performance has anything to do with it. I have the 2 NIC's in link aggression on one subnet and a third NIC on another subnet and I get the same performance from both. Another thing is the UFS file system wastes to much space. My 6Tb raid 5 is now 4.9Tb. I think I would be better off with a Linux raid 5 formated in ext4. Also the Linux software raid is far more mature then the BSD raid.

From the research I have done all BSD distros are plagued with slow transfer speeds to as far back as the early 2000's. You would think they would have it worked out by now. I guess BSD guys don't mind slow, lol. The point I am at now at 5.9Mb/s its at least livable.

 

[TimJacobs]

I have been looking for a Ubuntu based NAS system and I haven't been able to find out yet......... I like FreeNAS but like you said It's SLOW.

 

[14049752]

I have been looking for a Ubuntu based NAS system and I haven't been able to find out yet......... I like FreeNAS but like you said It's SLOW.

It's not Ubuntu, but I've been wanting to try out Vortexbox when I
get a chance. http://vortexbox.org/

(as a side note, this is a media centric NAS, but it can work as a "normal" nas, too.)

 

[TimJacobs]

I have been waiting for Open Media Vault but it doesn't look like it's going to be released anytime soon.

 

[vdub12]

I will have to check those out later.

I have also been looking at Openfiler. Its based on Redhat. You can't get much more stable then Redhat.

I don't know if I want to use Ubuntu. However, Debian is ridiculously stable.

 

[KompuKare]

Yes, BSD does seem a bit 'different' - a pity because FreeNAS works quite well. One problem I had with FreeNAS (well BSD actually) was that for my NIC there is no WOL support. But I still use FreeNAS on that server but now via ESXi (mainly for vm practice) and ESXi does support WOL on that NIC.

Totally off topic, but maybe the reason BSD seems a bit behind the times is precisely because the BSD license allows proprietary forks (MacOS etc.) and therefore real open source supporters and developers are reluctant to contribute to something which isn't protected by GPL.

 

[vdub12]

Totally off topic, but maybe the reason BSD seems a bit behind the times is precisely because the BSD license allows proprietary forks (MacOS etc.) and therefore real open source supporters and developers are reluctant to contribute to something which isn't protected by GPL.

I never even thought of that. Your probably right. Honestly I don't know why FreeNAS wasn't based on Linux to begin with. I heard a rumor a while back that FreeNAS was going to be ported to Linux but I guess the plan got scraped because I haven't herd anything else about it. It may have been based on BSD specifically so they could lock it down some day.

 

[TimJacobs]

I heard a rumor a while back that FreeNAS was going to be ported to Linux but I guess the plan got scraped because I haven't herd anything else about it.

Here it is on Slashdot

As it turns out the Linux Version of FreeNAS is named CoreNAS, now from there it is turning in to OpenMediaVault.

So I guess, OpenMediaVault will be the Linux version of FreeNAS.