I've finally moved my 7x Western Digital RE4 2TB array from my desktop computer over to a dedicated file server running FreeNAS 8.0.4, as this is my first attempt at FreeBSD and FreeNAS in the first place and I have only had experience running and configuring Windows and Mac's in the past I was curious about how this was all going to turn out.
But after one DOA motherboard and a pain in the arse rack-chase to build in it's all finally up and running. My hardware is as follows:
- Asus P8B-E/4L Intel C204 motherboard
- Intel Xeon E3-1270 CPU
- 16GB (4x 4GB) 1333MHz ECC RAM
- Gigabyte GeForce GT 520 (as I was stupid enough to get the E3-1270 instead of the E3-1275)
- LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i RAID controller
- FireWire 800 controller (but I guess FreeNAS does not support pushing backup towards external hard-drivers? nor grabbing data from external hard drives)
- 1x Intel 520-series SSD 60GB for FreeNAS 8.0.4 installation
- 7x Western Digital RE4 2TB drives for data storage
Installation went smoothly, network interface have been configured to run a 2x gigabit LACP link to my Cisco SRW2024 managed switch with fixed IP-address and the web-ui of FreeNAS is fairly easy to use even though I don't understand half of it's features.
Unfortunately the LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i does not seem to feature the possibility to just passthrough my hard drives without any RAID-configuration, and there doesn't seem to be any JBOD option so I have to configure my drives in a hardware RAID on the controller before I can get them up in FreeNAS resulting in no ZFS RAID possibilities. Honestly I have no idea how the whole ZFS filesystem work, but after what I have gathered the ideal solution would to be to have every disk running for themselves, formatting them with ZFS and then setting them up in either a RAIDZ or RAIDZ2 configuration. But that won't be a possibility because of the 9260-8i RAID controller.
So currently my seven drivers are configured in a RAID6 array on the controller, and this array has been formatted as ZFS in FreeNAS. Should I be doing something else here, or is this simply the best way for me to do it considering the RAID controller?
Besides this the setup has been fairly easy and straightforward, the only thing I can't seem to get my head around is getting the Apple File Sharing up and running. I have configured my share user, I have configured the AFP service, I have configured so my network share should be shared over AFP to my Mac's and they are all able to locate the FreeNAS share but I'm not able to connect? I keep retrieving connection failed every time I try. The moment I try connecting using CIFS / Samba it works though, but I would like to use AFP for my Mac's as I tend to get better performance that way.
Am I missing something obvious here? As the CIFS / Samba share seems to be working perfectly there shouldn't be anything other than my AFP configuration messing up things.
But after one DOA motherboard and a pain in the arse rack-chase to build in it's all finally up and running. My hardware is as follows:
- Asus P8B-E/4L Intel C204 motherboard
- Intel Xeon E3-1270 CPU
- 16GB (4x 4GB) 1333MHz ECC RAM
- Gigabyte GeForce GT 520 (as I was stupid enough to get the E3-1270 instead of the E3-1275)
- LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i RAID controller
- FireWire 800 controller (but I guess FreeNAS does not support pushing backup towards external hard-drivers? nor grabbing data from external hard drives)
- 1x Intel 520-series SSD 60GB for FreeNAS 8.0.4 installation
- 7x Western Digital RE4 2TB drives for data storage
Installation went smoothly, network interface have been configured to run a 2x gigabit LACP link to my Cisco SRW2024 managed switch with fixed IP-address and the web-ui of FreeNAS is fairly easy to use even though I don't understand half of it's features.
Unfortunately the LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i does not seem to feature the possibility to just passthrough my hard drives without any RAID-configuration, and there doesn't seem to be any JBOD option so I have to configure my drives in a hardware RAID on the controller before I can get them up in FreeNAS resulting in no ZFS RAID possibilities. Honestly I have no idea how the whole ZFS filesystem work, but after what I have gathered the ideal solution would to be to have every disk running for themselves, formatting them with ZFS and then setting them up in either a RAIDZ or RAIDZ2 configuration. But that won't be a possibility because of the 9260-8i RAID controller.
So currently my seven drivers are configured in a RAID6 array on the controller, and this array has been formatted as ZFS in FreeNAS. Should I be doing something else here, or is this simply the best way for me to do it considering the RAID controller?
Besides this the setup has been fairly easy and straightforward, the only thing I can't seem to get my head around is getting the Apple File Sharing up and running. I have configured my share user, I have configured the AFP service, I have configured so my network share should be shared over AFP to my Mac's and they are all able to locate the FreeNAS share but I'm not able to connect? I keep retrieving connection failed every time I try. The moment I try connecting using CIFS / Samba it works though, but I would like to use AFP for my Mac's as I tend to get better performance that way.
Am I missing something obvious here? As the CIFS / Samba share seems to be working perfectly there shouldn't be anything other than my AFP configuration messing up things.