A newish user with a few questions and issues

[Alex Boorman]

Hi I appreciate your help in advance I've done some searching but I've been unable to find any type of resolution or clear explanations for the issues I'm experiencing. I will try to provide as much information as seems relevant but if I've missed something of value let me know and I'll try to provide that as well.

My Hardware: (Built with leftovers from spare parts I had, all parts were used - by me - and in good working condition with the exception of one the drives) Intel Xeon E3-1270 v3 CPU, Asus Z87M-Plus MB, 8GB Kingston 1600MHz DDR3, Seasonic 450W Bronze PSU. 1 WD Green 3TB (New Drive), 1 WD Green 2TB.

My Usage: It was originally built as nothing but a place to stack a bunch of cheap hard drives to get alot of storage for disposable data (tivo backups, downloaded crap, virtual machine disks, etc) I had no real need or want for redundancy so I wasn't concerned about matching drives or setting up raid. Since then I've started using it as a primary storage device for data that I actually care about so I need to purchase more drives and actually set up a raid with parity. I'm running two jails fulltime Plex and a Debian jail for exim, nginx, ruby and some other various lightweight linux crap I do. (FreeNAS is my first real exposure to unix but im not clueless with linux)

My Issues: I've been using FreeNAS for almost 6 months now and at first it worked miraculously but for the last two months or so I've been experiencing some strange issues...

1. First sometimes when copying files to FreeNAS over Samba the entire server hard restarts (like pulling the power) and then it comes back up immediately. I can't seem to locate any logs and from what I've read FreeNAS doesn't have an internal logging facility? This seems strange maybe I don't have it configured correctly or I'm misunderstanding something? I'm quite certain that the PSU is solid and I have no indication of an issue with the topology on the MB and the fact that it only occurs under those specific circumstances lead me to believe maybe there is some kind of corruption or file system issues? For the record it has no bearing which share or volume im copying to.

2. Even though I have configured two separate volumes for each individual drive FreeNAS has given me the following usable storage space on each drive: 3TB Drive - 1.7TB Usable / 2TB Drive - 1.4TB Usable. Can someone explain to me why? At first I assumed it was size matching the drives but that doesn't even make sense here and I can find no real indication of how much drive space I've used. Each CIFS share just shows the total volume space minus what it has specifically used. IE. -

Volume A - 1.7TB
- SHARE A (250GB Size) - 1.45 TB Free
- SHARE B (100GB Size) - 1.6 TB Free

Is there a way to solve that so I can see meaning free drive space without having to doing the math myself?

3. In my Plex Jail which otherwise works great shares seem to randomly unmount for no apparent reason. I have to go back into the Dashboard and check the mounted box and apply it and it works great again for hours/days or weeks then the issue occurs again.

4. Should I be using de-duplication? I was intimidated because of the warnings that I might not have a beefy enough system or enough RAM to use it so I have simply ignored it.

I feel like in general I'm under configured and under utilizing FreeNAS but the help documents and info I've found so far have only served to further confuse me or provided little more than basic info. Can anyone suggest some subject appropriate reading or provide some insight into my issues?

Thanks again for your help and I hope I was clear in my explanations.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Don't use deduplication, that requires way more ram than you have and won't help with anything. Also please post the output ofzpool status and zfs list in code tags.

 

[Alex Boorman]

zpool status

Code:

[root@fileserv] ~# zpool status

  pool: Storage

state: ONLINE

  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 3h2m with 0 errors on Tue Aug 26 03:15:36 2014

config:



NAME                                          STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

Storage                                       ONLINE       0     0     0

  gptid/3e08d3ee-ce9f-11e3-ada1-e03f4914f4da  ONLINE       0     0     0



errors: No known data errors



  pool: Users

state: ONLINE

  scan: scrub repaired 0 in 0h39m with 0 errors on Tue Aug 26 00:47:17 2014

config:



NAME                                          STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM

Users                                         ONLINE       0     0     0

  gptid/7546e3b9-ce9f-11e3-ada1-e03f4914f4da  ONLINE       0     0     0



errors: No known data errors

zfs list

Code:

[root@fileserv] ~# zfs list

NAME                                          USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT

Storage                                      1.55T  1.13T  1.17G  /mnt/Storage

Storage/.system                              8.64M  1.13T   176K  /mnt/Storage/.system

Storage/.system/cores                         144K  1.13T   144K  /mnt/Storage/.system/cores

Storage/.system/rrd                           144K  1.13T   144K  /mnt/Storage/.system/rrd

Storage/.system/samba4                       6.09M  1.13T  3.86M  /mnt/Storage/.system/samba4

Storage/.system/syslog                       2.09M  1.13T  1.93M  /mnt/Storage/.system/syslog

Storage/Anime                                 576G  1.13T   576G  /mnt/Storage/Anime

Storage/Downloads                            59.1G  1.13T  59.1G  /mnt/Storage/Downloads

Storage/Downloads/Alex                        144K  1.13T   144K  /mnt/Storage/Downloads/Alex

Storage/Downloads/SickBeard                   144K  1.13T   144K  /mnt/Storage/Downloads/SickBeard

Storage/Downloads/Torrents                    160K  1.13T   160K  /mnt/Storage/Downloads/Torrents

Storage/Media                                 629G  1.13T   629G  /mnt/Storage/Media

Storage/Projects                             2.81G  1.13T  2.81G  /mnt/Storage/Projects

Storage/Software                              169G  1.13T   169G  /mnt/Storage/Software

Storage/VirtualMachines                      12.8G  1.13T  12.8G  /mnt/Storage/VirtualMachines

Storage/jails                                 133G  1.13T   848K  /mnt/Storage/jails

Storage/jails/.warden-template-debian-7.1.0   590M  1.13T   582M  /mnt/Storage/jails/.warden-template-debian-7.1.0

Storage/jails/.warden-template-pluginjail     710M  1.13T   702M  /mnt/Storage/jails/.warden-template-pluginjail

Storage/jails/appserv                         137M  1.13T   834M  /mnt/Storage/jails/appserv

Storage/jails/backupserv                      128G  1.13T   128G  /mnt/Storage/jails/backupserv

Storage/jails/bacula-sd_1                     194M  1.13T   892M  /mnt/Storage/jails/bacula-sd_1

Storage/jails/couchpotato_1                   198M  1.13T   895M  /mnt/Storage/jails/couchpotato_1

Storage/jails/plexmediaserver_1              3.49G  1.13T  2.71G  /mnt/Storage/jails/plexmediaserver_1

Users                                         134G  1.65T   168K  /mnt/Users

Users/Backups                                 100G  1.65T  10.3G  /mnt/Users/Backups

Users/Backups/TimeMachine                    89.9G  1.65T  89.9G  /mnt/Users/Backups/TimeMachine

Users/Profiles                               33.9G  1.65T  33.9G  /mnt/Users/Profiles

 

[Alex Boorman]

have you had a good experience with the WD Reds? I'm looking at buying 5 new drives and was considering the 3TB WD Reds

 

[Alex Boorman]

thanks for the help but i think I will just rebuild it all in debian. I'm not knowledgeable enough about this platform to solve problems in it and thats just too risky for my production data. Thanks anyways