A week or two with FreeNAS, couple problems

[John Hagensieker]

Built up my Lenovo TS14o with 3 4TB red drives and set up a Time Machine volume. About every 2 days I'd get a red error and a "zpool status -v" would tell me I had 3 or 4 errors usually on that volume.

After much googling I learned that when I configured and ordered my TS140 I got it with 16GB of non ECC RAM. I ordered up 16GB of ECC unbuffered Crucial RAM listed as compatible with the TS14o by the Crucial website and I've been up and running for 4 days now with no alerts. Also after I did my Time Machine volume and loaded my 3 computers backups on it I scrubbed the volume and set a bi-weekly scrub.

So far so good. Is it somewhat safe to say I'm ready for full deployment here? I've been hesitating deploying all my data on this server until I felt I had a good grip on FreeNAS and had played with it for a while.

I'm beginning to feel pretty confident in this build and somewhat surprised ECC RAM makes this big a difference (yes I've read everything about servers and ECC RAM on the internet). Seems like my web configuration page for FREENAS responds a lot faster as well for some reason.

John

 

[Jailer]

Did you run memtest before and after you replaced the RAM? The RAM could have been culprit but without testing it's impossible to know. I'd check your drive cables as well.

 

[John Hagensieker]

I did not run memtest however that same RAM is going in a "Super Budget" NAS I'm building today with another NAS OS. I'll see if it is problematic in that build.

 

[mattbbpl]

I did not run memtest however that same RAM is going in a "Super Budget" NAS I'm building today with another NAS OS. I'll see if it is problematic in that build.

Ideally you'll want to run Memtest and go through the hard drive burn-in process before deploying.

 

[John Hagensieker]

Ideally you'll want to run Memtest and go through the hard drive burn-in process before deploying.

Perfect. Thanks guys. Memtest it is. I'm not in any hurry to move my data over to here and slow and careful is what I'm looking for.

 

[pschatz100]

Perfect. Thanks guys. Memtest it is. I'm not in any hurry to move my data over to here and slow and careful is what I'm looking for.

If the memory works OK after thorough testing in the new system, then you'll be good to go. However, that doesn't mean the memory was not your culprit on your FreeNAS system. Some motherboards are a bit touchy about memory, and memory that shows issues in one machine may work great in another. That is why it is always a good idea to test memory thoroughly after building a system.