Confused Noob

[Neccros]

OK... I am running a VERY budget NAS box due to no extra cash but this is what I have:

Intel Mini-ITX w/ 3gigs DDR2, 2 x 2TB HD's running as a mirrored volume getting 1.8TB of space.

I got 2 more 2TB drives from a friend and I want to back up the mirror and combined all 4 2TB drives.

What are my options for RAID w/o additional hardware>? Or do you recommend something else?? I can't afford the ZFS requirements but using UFS as I am now works great and I am happy with it.

 

[L]

Budget would dictate 1 pool raidz.

I am really trying to get good data around the RAM requirements. I run my system with 1-2 users casual users at 6GB ram. I have gathered a ton of data and have never seen the ram requirements go above 1.8GB. For each mac client the ram usage increases by about 200MB. Most of the time when I save I am saving a completed project. I always also have a copy in my time machine and on the client. My users are really casual, meaning we save off to the nas about once every other day. I have opened the same file on 5 different machines and still didn't go above 1.7 GB ram. All bets are off if you plan to stream media. But still my freenas streams much better than my other appliances.

The one requirement I truly agree with is ecc. Take good backups. know going in, you can lose your data. My really important files(taxes, accounting, videos) I send off to the cloud, so if my house burns down i still have a copy.

 

[Neccros]

Not sure my hardware can handle ZFS... the Intel boards RAM limit is 4 gigs (non ECC) and I have a core 2 duo running at 2.93 Ghz.... This is just my personal NAS box and no one else will be using it but with the 2 new drives (4 total) I just wanted to know what my options were for redundancy. Right now its mirrored and so I'm somewhat protected from drive failures but I want more capacity.

Should I forget FreeNAS and look else where??

 

[Z300M]

Not sure my hardware can handle ZFS... the Intel boards RAM limit is 4 gigs (non ECC) and I have a core 2 duo running at 2.93 Ghz.... This is just my personal NAS box and no one else will be using it but with the 2 new drives (4 total) I just wanted to know what my options were for redundancy. Right now its mirrored and so I'm somewhat protected from drive failures but I want more capacity.

Should I forget FreeNAS and look else where??

Since the minimum memory requirement for FreeNAS is 8GB, with ECC RAM being strongly recommended, I think you should look elsewhere. NAS4Free may be more compatible with your available hardware -- or maybe something else altogether.

 

[cyberjock]

Neccros,

The requirement is 8GB unless you want to risk a kernel panic eating your pool. That being said...

1. UFS is an option, but keep in mind that virtually nobody uses it, so if you have problems you'll find almost nobody here with experience that can be useful.
2. UFS support is removed from FreeNAS 9.3. So you'll be stuck on 9.2.1.x forever.
3. NAS4Free may be an option as it seems to work better with less RAM. It does use ZFS, and ZFS really should only be used with ECC RAM. I don't believe NAS4Free offers any non-ZFS options, but I'm not a NAS4Free pro so I could be wrong.
4. Judging from the fact you are using DDR2, your CPU may not be particularly good at handling ZFS' workload.
5. Do consider other OSes when deciding how to proceed. FreeNAS may not be the best bet for your situation, and it sounds like it might not.

 

[Neccros]

I just want a simple box with 4 drives running raid 5 if possible... I have no need for a high available, high load NAS...

Anyway to have 2 mirrored volumes in one machine?

As George Carlin said, "I need a place for my stuff"

 

[cyberjock]

Your comment tends to support the "FreeNAS is not for you" argument. :/

You can have as many volumes in whatever configuration is supported in FreeNAS. Unfortunately RAID5 is not supported in UFS. Only stripes, mirrors and RAID3 are supported.

 

[Neccros]

I understand I need ECC and a server mobo, and that FreeNAS is out of my league, etc. It sucks when you finally get a job after being unemployed for 4 years and your savings went down the drain...

I'm just looking for a simple way to "glue" 4 drives together with some redundancy so I can organize and sort about 20-30+ hard drives worth of files I accumulated over the years before they take a crap...

"knock knock, hello NAS4Free??" LOL

 

[Neccros]

OK riddle me this, IF I can source a server mobo and some ECC, how OLD of a mobo and server CPU and ECC ram can I get away with just to run a basic ZFS setup???

 

[leenux_tux]

Neccros,

When I first started out with freenas the "advertised" Max RAM for my motherboard was 4GB. I read on a post somehere (not on freenas forums) that the mobo would actually use 8GB no problem. So, I installed 8GB. It worked flawlessly for 2 years.

I still have the system in my home office, not used at the moment, why ? It was a compact system that only took 4 drives and I quickly outgrew the disk capacity. I plan to use it for Proxmox testing though.

Moral of the story? Do a bit of research on your mobo and make sure it really IS restricted to 4GB of RAM

 

[Neccros]

Possibly so but the board has no ECC support

 

[leenux_tux]

Neither did mine. And I never had an issue.

At the end of the day its your choice what you do. I ran my system like that for two years, no problems. In fact, the hard drives were migrated to a new server intact, just imported the pool. One thing I did have was regular, structured backups (grandfather, father, son type thing) which made me a bit more comfortable about getting my data back in the event of a problem, until my financial situation allowed me to purchase server grade equipment.

 

[Neccros]

So if I could run 8gigs, what ZFS raid level you recommend??? What did you use??

 

[Ericloewe]

OK riddle me this, IF I can source a server mobo and some ECC, how OLD of a mobo and server CPU and ECC ram can I get away with just to run a basic ZFS setup???

Nehalem-era stuff is the oldest I'd trust, but keep in mind power consumption is significantly higher than Sandy Bridge and newer.

 

[leenux_tux]

I used a 4 disk raidz1. Which, according to this forum, and other sources, is a BIG no. Raidz1 has a write hole which, combined with non_ecc ram can cause data corruption. However, again, I will stress I had NO issues, and still don't, three years later.

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous post was I ran memtest on my RAM for like, two days to make sure it was OK.

 

[Ericloewe]

I used a 4 disk raidz1. Which, according to this forum, and other sources, is a BIG no. Raidz1 has a write hole which, combined with non_ecc ram can cause data corruption. However, again, I will stress I had NO issues, and still don't, three years later.

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous post was I ran memtest on my RAM for like, two days to make sure it was OK.

The problem isn't the write hole, ZFS is plenty capable of handling that.

The problem is the relatively high likelihood of an unrecoverable read error occurring during a RAID5/RAIDZ1 rebuild - this effectively puts the pool into a known-bad state that ZFS refuses to deal it (out of principle).
ZFS doesn't take corruption. Anything is immediately corrected when detected - if it can't be corrected, ZFS draws the line and refuses to deal with corrupt data. Of course, non-ECC RAM can screw with this behavior, as widely documented.

The fact that some were lucky does not influence the statistic. The events are independent and thus their outcomes do not influence each other. Said probability is known to be non-trivial (as some unfortunate souls have lost their data due to bad RAM and a few more have been saved by ECC). ECC reduces this probability to ridiculously trivial.

 

[Starpulkka]

Sounds like a you can do some oldskool stuff, put up a linux and samba services, and take journaling off on ext3 (as it is then ext2) and if you really want some redundancy you can do it with multipar and some checksum software. And if you automate this its like 10 € setup versus 1000 € ZFSNAS. (1000€ setup is ofcourse better.)