Building the first FreeNAS

[agray19]

:)Hi,
Somewhere in US northeast ... just ordered all the hardware needed to build my first FreeNAS:

CFI A7879 Mini-ITX Home Server/NAS Chassis
Biostar N68S3+ motherboard
AMD Sempron 2.8 GHz CPU
4GB of RAM
4GB USB stick
4 x 1TB SATA drives
FreeNAS software

Not sure which way to go yet ... ZFS or not ...

AG

 

[ben]

On 4GB RAM, stick with UFS.

 

[cyberjock]

No ZFS with 4GB of RAM.. consult the manual.

 

[agray19]

Thanks,
Well that solves one problem ... UFS it will be ... for now.
Thanks,
AG

 

[agray19]

I am installing 8 GB of RAM and 4 x 1TB hard drives. The system should allow me now to use the ZFS file structure. Does anyone know how much storage space will be available depending on what ZRAID I pick?
Thanks,
Alex

 

[JaimieV]

Read Cyberjock's Guide from his sig - it'll get you going. I think I just said that to you in another thread maybe? Worth saying twice!

 

[ben]

With 4 drives, I suggest either RAID-Z2 or a stripe of two ZFS mirrors (the equivalent of RAID 10). Either choice will give you two drives of redundancy, leaving you with 2TB usable (minus swap space and the lying-drive-manufacturer penalty). RAID-Z2 will be simpler to set up and allows any two disks to fail, but anecdotally has lower performance. A stripe of ZFS mirrors is a bit trickier to set up and only allows one disk to fail from each mirror, but may be higher performance.

Not recommended but with higher capacity is RAID-Z, which will give you 3TB usable but is a suboptimal array, suffering some performance and capacity penalties.

 

[agray19]

RAID-Z2 sound like the way to go ... for me anyway.
Thanks,
Alex

 

[joeschmuck]

I think you should figure out what data you plan to store on your FreeNAS system before you pick a RAIDZ type. If you are only streaming video and music, a RAID-Z1 (single drive failure allowed) is fine. If you are going to backup computer files and have no plans to back those files up to other media (DVD-R or CD-R), then maybe RAID-Z2 is for you. There are a lot of things to consider.

I recommend you do not store unrecoverable (valuable and not backed up) data on your FreeNAS system for a few weeks so you can reformat your hard drives if you desire to try out and test the advantages of each different configuration. Lets be honest, 2TB of storage is not very much for a NAS unless you are using it for a small amount of data, plus you need to keep free a minimum of 10% of the space for ZFS to work well. When all is said and done you would end up with about 1.6TB of space (just an estimate for a RAID-Z2 with four 2TB drives and a 2GB swap space for each drive). Also I recommend changing the swap space to zero (0) before formatting the drives since you have 8GB of RAM and only the four 2TB drives. I run five 2TB drives on 8GB RAM in a RAID-Z1 configuration with no swap space assigned for the drives. I have just over 3GB of RAM available for the ARC so things stay speedy and I just don't need the headache of the swap space.

Please know that these are just my opinions and some of my experience. I don't want to talk you into something you don't feel comfortable doing but you should know your options.

As Ben said, a Striped Mirror can give you better performance in the correct environment. So it really depends on what you plan to use your FreeNAS system for.

Good Luck on your adventure.

 

[ben]

I recommend not storing unrecoverable (not backed up) data anywhere. Always have backups! Always always always!

 

[joeschmuck]

I recommend not storing unrecoverable (not backed up) data anywhere. Always have backups! Always always always!

But you know that as much as we may say it, only a very few will listen to the warnings and take them seriously. The rest will wait until they have not only lost data once, but likely a few times or it will be some very significant data just once and that sure changes a persons mind about making faithful backups of your data.

 

[ben]

But you know that as much as we may say it, only a very few will listen to the warnings and take them seriously. The rest will wait until they have not only lost data once, but likely a few times or it will be some very significant data just once and that sure changes a persons mind about making faithful backups of your data.

How do you think I got this way? ;)

 

[el-John-o]

But you know that as much as we may say it, only a very few will listen to the warnings and take them seriously. The rest will wait until they have not only lost data once, but likely a few times or it will be some very significant data just once and that sure changes a persons mind about making faithful backups of your data.

It amazes ME how many people find it 'silly' to do backups.

My wife is a professional photographer. We store her images on our home file server (FreeNAS) and an off-site backup. Also, when she does a shoot, the images get stored BOTH on her laptop AND on an external drive (most of her work is on location) until she gets 'back to base' and then it is copied off of the external drive and into the server (where it is automatically uploaded to a cloud backup service over time). Where she begins her workflow (She doesn't do any post processing on her laptop, laptop displays just aren't adequate, she just uses it as a mobile file storage solution so she isn't relying on an entire days work being stored on a few CompactFlash or SD cards). There are a lot of folks, even clients (who have paid good money to have those pictures taken) who think that is all silly and a waste of money. Sheesh!

It has saved her bacon a couple of times. Drive failures, laptop failures, you name it.

My Doctor, who I've known for a long time, wanted my help with an issue he was having with his laptop. While doing so I discovered he kept all of his medical records in a digital EMR (electronic medical records) application, one a single-hard drive server under his desk (old Dell computer). I encouraged him (and even told him I'd set it up for him) to back up to an external drive and take that external drive home with him every night, and then use a DIFFERENT drive the next day (so rotate between two) in case he ever had a fire or something, he would have an off-site backup. He did, we got him setup with a nice 'dock' that automatically backs up his files to a 3.5" drive. But prior to this he had never even thought about a backup, or what would happen if that one hard drive in that one old server failed!

 

[joeschmuck]

I'd like to hear from the original poster how his computer system is working out.

I know this is off topic but I thought this would be a good story to tell.

I lived a life of hard knocks getting to the point of making backups these days. I recall my first experience was in college while writing a Fortran IV program on a mainframe computer terminal. I had typed most of the code in and then the mainframe took a dive. This was routine for the mainframe so I should have known (after being told of this a few times) and I should have saved my work periodically. So I started saving my programming periodically, most of the time but still I got bit. You know I didn't have that problem when I was using punch cards :).

So time goes by and I work my way through and Apple IIC and the IBM PC. I learned a few more times that I should be saving my data frequently. The 80286, 80386, 80486, etc... all hit the streets and I loose some data. Clearly I'm having issues with saving data. Once the CD-R hits the streets I start saving important data faithfully. Now that we can afford lots of hard drive storage and a NAS, I now save entire computer images, not just my important data, and important data also get written to CD/DVD media.

So I did learn the hard way as well. And there is really no excuse for anyone to make backups of their important data but most people will learn the hard way. I recall someone asking me if i could recover their photos from the computer hard drive after they had run some application which basically destroyed all the data on the hard drive. I think they were playing around with a drive wiping program, something like that. All I could do was tell him I couldn't recover the data and maybe a data recovery service could help. He told me his wife was going to kill him. The next day his name was in the news paper obituaries. Okay, she didn't kill him but it wasn't a pretty sight.

 

[brando]

I recommend not storing unrecoverable (not backed up) data anywhere. Always have backups! Always always always!

that being said, do you guys think the inherent risk of Raid-Z1 is an acceptable risk if you are DEFINITELY planning on having off-site, up to date backups anyways?. I am videographer and plan to edit / reference my files directly from the NAS so I'm a bit turned off by the Raid-Z2 option after reading in the user guide that it is slower than RaidZ1. I'm already in the habit of maintaining regular off-site backups and I don't see that ever changing.

 

[cyberjock]

That totally depends on what you define as slower. For me, my array that is RAIDZ3 can do over 1GB/sec. If it would have been 'faster' as a RAIDZ2 would I have cared? My pool can already do almost 10x the speed of a single Gb LAN port. So relativity matters.

Yes, RAIDZ2 is "slower" than a RAIDZ1. Just as that awesome Lamborghini you're going to buy me tomorrow still will be limited to doing 65 MPH on the freeway unless I want a lot of tickets. So while technically my car is faster than your SUV, we'll still be stuck traveling the same speed.

How much slower is a big question only you can answer on your own hardware. Will you even care is again based on what your server is capable of serving up(and receiving). If you're using wifi, the slowest Atom could do a RAIDZ2 and max out the wifi.

Personally, I won't build zpools with RAIDZ1. All it takes is one flaky disk and one that has failed and you WILL have to restore from backups because some data will be corrupt. Is it really worth all that effort when you could have spent some money on an extra disk to start with? Its a cost vs value equation only you can decide on for yourself. I know if a company contract me to build them a machine I'd never go with less than a RAIDZ2. CPUs can be bought that are plenty powerful enough to make the "slower" RAIDZ2 not matter. My CPU is 4+ years old and I do 1GB/sec when I scrub my pool.

 

[joeschmuck]

that being said, do you guys think the inherent risk of Raid-Z1 is an acceptable risk if you are DEFINITELY planning on having off-site, up to date backups anyways?. I am videographer and plan to edit / reference my files directly from the NAS so I'm a bit turned off by the Raid-Z2 option after reading in the user guide that it is slower than RaidZ1. I'm already in the habit of maintaining regular off-site backups and I don't see that ever changing.

I agree with CyberJock, speed is relative and it's up to your needs. You are doing things right by having an offsite backup but how frequent do you do that? If it's nightly then how much data could you loose in one work day? Is there a real risk of data loss for you? If not and you have no issues performing a full restoration (not sure how much data that is for you) then that is fine. But if you have a few TB's of data then you need to factor in the time it takes to restore all that data, even more so if the offsite data is stored over the internet.

If it's your work product then I don't see how you could go less than RAIDZ2. If even one project is destroyed, what does that cost you, less that the cost of one more drive? Again, you need to factor that in.

Getting back to speed again... I wouldn't think you would be editing files directly from any NAS but rather copy the files you want to edit to a local drive and then do your editing, then put the edited files on the NAS. But if you are looking at maybe 10Gb ports (lots of money) then maybe you could get good speed for video editing on the fly.

 

[brando]

wow - thanks so much guys. I hadn't really considered that those speeds would potentially be hindered by my network speed anyways. Joeschmuck you're right, I think it probably makes more sense to keep the files local as I edit, then place them on the NAS afterwards which certianly renders its speed a bit less important to me. Cyberjock, I'm reading your guide now. Thanks again!

 

[gpsguy]

Yes, that would be the way to do it.

Historically, one might even want to use RAID0 for video editing. Considering editing your video's on SSD and then moving them to less expensive storage.

I think it probably makes more sense to keep the files local as I edit

 

[brando]

Historically, one might even want to use RAID0 for video editing.

thanks for the tip, I've read a lot of video guys are doing this so I may actually do a test with a couple spare drives and see if a local RAID0 will give me a significant performance. Back to the NAS, if I'm no longer concerned with performance and can focus on redundancy, I like the idea of going RAID1 sets (in 3tb disk increments). That will make it hurt ($) a lot less in the beginning and allow me to add to it as the budget allows. That will also be a smooth and gradual way to start employing a third backup which I've been putting off - the third being the remote. Then I guess per each drive I will have the benefit of a two-disk failsafe a la RAIDZ2. Currently my work is spread across Three 3tb Firewire drives and I have a mirror of each. I'd love to be able to mothball some of these files but I actually reference them quite often and the mess of harddrives on my desktop (including a time machine and an os clone drive) is making me insane which explains why I am here