First FreeNAS Build - Help Verify Hardware

[KDatt]

Hi,

Rbrinson - thanks for the quick reply, I'm glad the motherboard works quite well. Im confident enough to purchase the build above. You're right that I am considering JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks). The larger of the three disks will be movies and TV shows, one of the smaller ones is for music, documents and pictures. The final to do scheduled (not raid) delta back ups of the pictures, documents and music i have.

Honey badger - I really appreciate your concerns but I understand that ECC ram (and other compliant hardware) is only required if you are running ZFS. As such I do not need to have ECC.

What are the advantages of ZFS over UFS? The reasons I believe I don't need it are below - are they valid?
1. I do not care so much about data on the large disk, its just movies and TV shows. If it goes it goes, I'll buy a new one and start again.
2. The pictures and documents are backed up to the second small drive. If anything happens to one I'll have the other. I'll replace the faulty drive and run a full back up on the new drive.
3. Improved read and write from ZFS is not a massive concern as streaming of media will at Max be 20mbps.
4. I don't really want to spend money on lots of RAM

Is there anything I missing? Should I really be considering ZFS over UFS?

Thanks again guys.
P.S - sorry for the brevity and any spelling errors - its not so easy to write this on my phone.

 

[cyberjock]

I was not aware of this issue, and I cannot disagree with what HoneyBadger is saying. However, all of this is about trade offs. How much money can you/are you willing to spend on a server. ECC RAM is not cheap. If the server is for a company, then spending the extra money is probably prudent as downtime could be a real problem, but for personal use, it may not be as important as other financial obligations. Having a backup strategy for any computer is important. As a measure against losing my zpool, I keep a weekly backup of my server data using rsync via cron to two external drives connected to the server as a UFS volume. So, I can always rebuild my array from the backup.

Hahaha. Sorry. I shouldn't laugh.

Have you read that ECC thread? You do realize that if your primary server has non-ECC RAM that goes bad, it'll trash your backups done from rsync? See, normally people consider the backups to be an individual identity that is nothing more than a copy of the original pool. But, if you get detailed enough you'll see that:

1. non-ECC RAM causes random corruption of the data.. in RAM.
2. ZFS won't identify this corruption, and will pass along the file system files to rsync(which is corrupted)
3. rsync will take that corrupted data and decide that your file has changed from the backup server! (because of the corruption)
4. rsync will gladly update your backup server with the changed(read: corrupted) data.
5. You find out later when your primary server is trashed that your non-ECC RAM is bad. No problem you say, you'll go to the backups! Then...
6. You realize your backups are trashed too!

So was the non-ECC RAM worth it?

And yes, we've literally had a dozen or so users see their backups get trashed in EXACTLY the fashion I described above.

So you have a very big fallacy in your assumptions. And if you end up with bad RAM on your server, your backups are done for.

And yes, it's a tradeoff. And the reason why we pound the whole ECC arguement into everyone's face when they show up here and look even remotely clueless, too many think exactly like you did. Eh, I got backups, I'm safe. No, you aren't safe. And the fallacy that you used is exactly what the other people thought was keeping them safe. One guy lost pictures of his daughter that he lost in a house fire. I felt really bad, but there was literally nothing we could do for him. This is why I keep harping on the "attention to detail". To see if you really are safe you have to have a detailed understanding of this stuff. Otherwise, you're going to be sadly disappointed when things go wrong.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Honey badger - I really appreciate your concerns but I understand that ECC ram (and other compliant hardware) is only required if you are running ZFS. As such I do not need to have ECC.

What are the advantages of ZFS over UFS? The reasons I believe I don't need it are below - are they valid?
1. I do not care so much about data on the large disk, its just movies and TV shows. If it goes it goes, I'll buy a new one and start again.
2. The pictures and documents are backed up to the second small drive. If anything happens to one I'll have the other. I'll replace the faulty drive and run a full back up on the new drive.
3. Improved read and write from ZFS is not a massive concern as streaming of media will at Max be 20mbps.
4. I don't really want to spend money on lots of RAM

Is there anything I missing? Should I really be considering ZFS over UFS?

Thanks again guys.
P.S - sorry for the brevity and any spelling errors - its not so easy to write this on my phone.

Sorry, I must have overlooked that you were planning to run UFS. Non-ECC RAM is a lower risk with UFS, but I would argue that if those pictures have any value to you, you should be using ZFS and building properly to protect them. Have a look at the ArsTechnica article here regarding "bit-rot" and ask yourself if you'd be heartbroken if one of your pictures suffered the same fate as the first page of the article.

As cyberjock pointed out above as well, remember that "backups" are only valid if you catch the corruption before you cycle the good backup out.

Regarding the cost argument, I see it a lot; not saying you're making this mistake, but I see a lot of people taking the cost of a bargain-basement corner-cutter rig on an AMD E-350 board with a cheapo SATA controller and Realtek NIC, and comparing that to an E3 Xeon on a Supermicro board. That's not a fair comparison. Sure, you might be able to get an E-350 combo for $100 that has the board, chip, and RAM - and the G860/X9SCM/8GB-ECC combo is $250 - but the latter has two onboard Intel NICs, much more horsepower, and has a much higher change of "Just Working."

The best statement I can make is "what is your data worth to you?" My data is priceless; I'm just glad I didn't have to spend a fortune to protect it.

 

[jgreco]

ECC RAM is not cheap.

Sadly, all RAM costs money. ECC is only a little bit more expensive than non-ECC.

 

[ser_rhaegar]

I've had photos become corrupted on my desktop from bad ram. Had thousands of photos from a span of 10 years, trips around the globe and family events. Not all were lost but some important ones were.

I can't imagine using anything except ECC to store family photos anymore.

 

[KDatt]

HoneyBadger - thanks for the link, it has made me consider using a ZFS system.

Ser_Rhaegar - thanks, and I agree...I won't be best pleased if my pcitures got currupted.

The issues I have is that I don't want ZFS for the whole system, I think it is a little over kill for my needs. Can I have a mixed system as described below?

1 x 4tb - UFS for movies and TV shows
1 x 500gb - ZFS for documents pictures and music
1 x 500gb - ZFS back up of the first 500gb drive

Is this doable? If I got a 4gb ECC it should meet the requirements of 1gb of ECC ram to 1tb of ZFS drive, do I have to make any other considerations before doing this, is the motherboard good a ZFS and ECC ram?

Thanks guys & gals.

 

[jgreco]

We have basically had bad luck with people with less-than-8GB systems and ZFS. That's why all the docs establish 8GB as a floor for ZFS.

I agree that in theory that ought to be fine, but since we don't fully understand the 8GB floor, I can't bless such a config.

Basically we've seen problems from users without the skillset to help debug and identify the issues.

Since I assume the desire to use ZFS is a result of wanting to protect your data, advising you to do something we have seen result in data loss is a nonstarter.

 

[HoneyBadger]

HoneyBadger - thanks for the link, it has made me consider using a ZFS system.

do I have to make any other considerations before doing this, is the motherboard good a ZFS and ECC ram?

Thanks guys & gals.

Glad I could change your mind. Any time someone hints that they're storing anything personal rather than commercial I really want to steer them towards ZFS.

Regarding the rest of the comment, unfortunately that board isn't capable of supporting ECC RAM. The CPU is though.

 

[KDatt]

Unfortunately - looking at cost's I don't think I can afford to implement ZFS. So that leaves me with two options
1. Don't store any pictures/document on the FreeNAS - just stuff I am willing to loose.
2. Store everything on there and hope for the best.

I guess it comes down to what is safer. Is storing my sensitive data on UFS disks in FreeNAS safer then storing them on my Ubuntu/Windows/MacOSX laptops and desktops. If it is safer or just as safe then I will go with option 2, otherwise I will look into online storage or alternative for my prized picture and document.

Thanks everyone - you have all been great!

 

[HoneyBadger]

I guess it comes down to what is safer. Is storing my sensitive data on UFS disks in FreeNAS safer then storing them on my Ubuntu/Windows/MacOSX laptops and desktops. If it is safer or just as safe then I will go with option 2, otherwise I will look into online storage or alternative for my prized picture and document.

Thanks everyone - you have all been great!

Any storage that isn't on ZFS or a filesystem with similar features is vulnerable to bitrot, but UFS isn't any less safe than NTFS/HFS/ext4/etc.

Regarding your options of "store it all" versus "cloud online storage" ... Why not both? Store it on the FreeNAS box, and back it up to cloud/burn to multiple DVDs/offline cold-storage. When it comes to backups, there's no kill like overkill.

 

[KDatt]

Hi all,

A quick update on my first rig - everything on first appearances seem to work well on FreeNAS 9.2.1.2 x64 (Stable).
However, I tired to set up CIFS shares (Samba Share) and I get an message that it cannot start the service. After reading a couple of posts about this bug, I tried following a workaround by changing the ACL of the volume I wish to share via CIFS from "Unix" to "Windows / Mac OS", after making this change and rebooting the system fails to boot up correctly. For some reason it doesn't start the Web GUI forcing me to do multiple restarts to no avail eventually factory restore and starting again.

I am about to try 9.2.1 to see if it is any better - can anyone recommend a version that will allow CIFS sharing with all the bells and whistles like Plex/Sickbeard/Couch Potato .... no need for ZFS

Thanks again everyone.

Kish