Do I Have the Right Motherboard?

[FittyFrank]

Hi guys,

I'm new to freenas as I've only used it over the last month. I first set it up on a very old box to see what it was all about and used UFS. Then I set up a zfs mirror with two 250 GB drives to see if I could configure media streaming to my ps3 and wii, etc. This all worked on an old HP Compaq dc5700 computer with 4 GB of ram (link: http://www.cnet.com/products/hp-compaq-dc5700-microtower-series/specs/). However, my write speeds were only 1-3 MB/sec. I thought this was due to old hardware and not meeting the required 8 GB of memory.

I decided to build something more modern to meet the ZFS requirements.
ASRock H81M-DGS R2.0 LGA 1150 Intel H81 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard (LINK: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157483)
Intel Core i3-4130T Haswell 2.9GHz LGA 1150 35W
Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR 1600 (PC312800) Desktop Memory Model CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9
Three WD Red 2TB 6 GB/s NAS Hard Drives

Before I go on with the what I've been trying to figure out, my first question is, does my motherboard need to support raid in order to create a raid zfs volume in FreeNAS? I assumed with software raid that FreeNAS would handle that. Isn't onboard motherboard raid just a cheaper alternative to a designated raid controller card? Maybe this question is too dumb to be asked anywhere because I can't find an answer.

If the answer is yes, I will replace my motherboard with a more appropriate one.
If the answer is no, that the volume should still be created with my current motherboard, then I'm afraid I have more questions.

I've been at this problem for a couple weeks, and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Frank

 

[Ericloewe]

Ok, couple of things to keep in mind:

a) Make Sure your motherboard supports ECC memory. The one you chose does not support ECC! You need a C2xx PCH to use ECC.
b) That memory is not ECC! Very bad idea. Also, it's a good idea to use 8GB DIMMs instead of 4GB, for future expansion.

Now, your questions:

No software/fake-RAID or hardware RAID support is required (or desired). FreeNAS does everything. It just needs a controller that will do the talking and leave the managing up to FreeNAS.

If hardware is supported and there was no RAID controller or RAID setup involved (which there shouldn't be!), you can, at any moment, move your boot drive and all your HDDs to a new system, reconfigure networks, and everything should be working.

I suggest you read Cyberjock's guide (check the sticky or his signature) - it'll guide you through the initial questions that inevitably arise.

 

[FittyFrank]

Hi Eric,

Thanks for your reply. I will definitely look into an ECC motherboard and memory.

As for for answer, that it was I thought based on what I read. Here is my problem however:

When I moved from the old unsuitable HP computer to my newly built machine, I moved over my flashdrive with freenas and the two hard drives I had mirrored. FreeNAS recognized everything and it worked. However, my transfer speeds were still incredibly slow in CIFS (1-3 MB/s) rather than the 40 MB/s + that I see I should be getting. I don't know why this is so. Would a long ethernet cord affect speed? I do have two ethernet corders joined by an adapter with two female sockets on either end.

After doing some more reading, I saw that certain settings are disabled in the installation of freenas if there is not enough memory. Since I don't know much about freeBSD, I decided to do a fresh install without unmounting the drives (which turned out to be a huge problem). When I reinstalled freenas, it won't let me mount to the two old 250GB drives I had. I get these two errors:

Error: Unable to create the pool: cannot mount '/mnt/Home': failed to create mountpoint,

Error: Unable to GPT format the disk "ada0"

Apparently it still thinks the disks are set up in a mirror still (confirmed by booting the HDDs in an ubuntu live boot. However, from the terminal window, FreeNAS does not recognize that a mirror exists. I've done everything to clear the disks (using tools in both Ubuntu, Windows, tried to follow some terminal commands from online forums, and even zeroed the drive using Western Digital's own software. Still the same problem.

As 250GB isn't nearly enough to store all my data, I suggested upgrading to two 2 TBs, but I was swayed to get a third as it was safer according to my IT guy at work. New drives came in, and I still get the same problem.

I have no idea what else to do, and have left both myself and the IT guy at work clueless (I should mention he's only worked in Windows environments).

Do I dare install a fresh copy of FreeNAS onto my usb stick, another usb stick, or is this problem related to something else?

 

[FittyFrank]

Update from ASRock:
"Motherboard’schipset must be ready for RAID, since the motherboard does not support nor software can make it to recognized RAID

ASRock America Support"

Can anyone verify this? FreeNAS was still running in a mirror after I upgraded the motherboard. It was only after I installed a fresh copy of freenas 9.2.1 did I receive my errors.

 

[Ericloewe]

Update from ASRock:
"Motherboard’schipset must be ready for RAID, since the motherboard does not support nor software can make it to recognized RAID

ASRock America Support"

Can anyone verify this? FreeNAS was still running in a mirror after I upgraded the motherboard. It was only after I installed a fresh copy of freenas 9.2.1 did I receive my errors.

That's typical outsourced helpdesk. Inaccurate, even technically wrong. For them "RAID" is limited to fakeRAID from the chipset. Just ignore what they said, it has nothing to do with FreeNAS and/or ZFS.

It's hard to say what your problem is exactly, as it's not quite clear what steps were taken that caused it...

A few general pointers, though:

Reinstalling FreeNAS is typically not a problem, as the important stuff is kept on the disks.

You seem to be trying to create a new pool, have you read the documentation, particularly the sections covering pool imports?

Those adapters that join two ethernet cables should avoided like the plague, nothing good ever came from them. A long cable should not be a problem, if you're inside the standard's restrictions (100m Cat. 5 for 100Mb/s, ~50m Cat. 5E for 1Gb/s, 100m Cat. 6 for 1Gb/s). The use of crappy Realtek GbE adapters is also known to cause slowness.

 

[FittyFrank]

I installed the latest version of freenas (9.2.1.5) and everything started working again. However, I was still having write speeds maxing out at 2.5 MB/s. My LAN chipset is Realtek RTL8111G. Before diving into this, I decided to try using internet rather than wireless. My write speeds start around 20-25 MB/s and then drop to 10-13. Much faster than before, so I'm going to leave it alone for now. I guess the bottle neck was just on my laptops end.