First FreeNAS Build

[A Bull With Yogurts]

Someday, you could plug in six more. :p

LOL. Yep, there is that of course.

 

[Stux]

initially looked at the Fractal Design Node 304 (when I was considering a mini-ITX mobo) but things looked awfully cramped in there from an airflow perspective.

FWIW, I'm working on a Node 304 build with 6x 7200rpm drives (these run significantly hotter than 5200rpm drives).

I had to change the front case fans to Noctua to control the heat (and noise) as under load the high setting was barely capable of cooling the drives to my satisfaction with the included fans.

With 5200rpm drives the included fans would work fine.

Point is, the airflow design is good and with good cable management it's quite neat.

 

[A Bull With Yogurts]

Also, if you're going to boot off USB then you should get a second one and mirror the first.

Just sat down to order another 16GB USB flash drive to act as a mirror, and I'm wondering whether it's worth it.

USB drives are notoriously fragile and seem like a Mickey Mouse solution. Once this system is up and running I really don't want to be dealing with a corrupted OS or failed boot drive. I'm well past the age where I enjoy tinkering with hardware, I just want it to work reliably.

So...straw poll...is it worth me shelling out 30 quid for a 32GB SATA3 SSD to use as a boot drive instead?

 

[Redcoat]

So...straw poll...is it worth me shelling out 30 quid for a 32GB SATA3 SSD to use as a boot drive instead?

If you've got a port to put it in, absolutely!

 

[tvsjr]

Absolutely! Why drop all the coin on a very nice NAS solution, only to handicap it with $10 boot devices?

 

[pschatz100]

So...straw poll...is it worth me shelling out 30 quid for a 32GB SATA3 SSD to use as a boot drive instead?

Most of the experienced forum contributors will tell you, YES, if you have an available Sata port. I still boot from USB flash drives, and average one bad flash drive per year. Not a show stopper, if you keep proper backups of your configuration, but still annoying when problems happen - which is usually when doing a FreeNAS update.

Edit: Have installed an SSD for boot drive. Finally got tired of being annoyed...

 

[wblock]

So...straw poll...is it worth me shelling out 30 quid for a 32GB SATA3 SSD to use as a boot drive instead?

I would get a 120GB drive. Price is not much more, more space for boot environments and wear leveling. (It's not "wasted" space.)

 

[A Bull With Yogurts]

Thanks folks. Appreciate the opinions. Just back from a couple of weeks on holiday and will cough up for a a decent SSD.

 

[Stux]

Absolutely! Why drop all the coin on a very nice NAS solution, only to handicap it with $10 boot devices?

Because my mini ITX board in my 6 bay mini ITX case has six Sata ports ;)

...Which is why it's booting off m.2 ;)

 

[Chris Moore]

Might be missing something here... but would there be any benefit to having the 8 port version if I only need to connect 2 drives?

I know I am late to the party, but have a look at this:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-PERC...b-s-SAS-RAID-Controller-0HV52W-/192120866079?
I use these in my systems and they cross flash to IT mode perfectly and are a super good value. I chose to put all my of my SATA drives on the SAS controller. It just works better than having them on a SATA controller, in my experience.

 

[Chris Moore]

Just sat down to order another 16GB USB flash drive to act as a mirror, and I'm wondering whether it's worth it.

USB drives are notoriously fragile and seem like a Mickey Mouse solution. Once this system is up and running I really don't want to be dealing with a corrupted OS or failed boot drive. I'm well past the age where I enjoy tinkering with hardware, I just want it to work reliably.

So...straw poll...is it worth me shelling out 30 quid for a 32GB SATA3 SSD to use as a boot drive instead?

I use 40 GB laptop drives for the boot drives. I connect a pair of them on the SATA controller built into the system board and have all the data drive connected to the SAS controllers (two of them) for 14 data drives, 7 on each controller. Works reliably and you can use smartmontools / smartctl to test and monitor the health of the boot drives much better because it returns useful diagnostics on an actual disk where the data returned from a SSD is not very useful and it won't even do USB. I have four servers (2 at home and 2 at work) that have been running this way with mirrored boot drives for a couple years and no problems at all.

 

[A Bull With Yogurts]

I use 40 GB laptop drives for the boot drives. I connect a pair of them on the SATA controller built into the system board and have all the data drive connected to the SAS controllers (two of them) for 14 data drives, 7 on each controller. Works reliably and you can use smartmontools / smartctl to test and monitor the health of the boot drives much better because it returns useful diagnostics on an actual disk where the data returned from a SSD is not very useful and it won't even do USB. I have four servers (2 at home and 2 at work) that have been running this way with mirrored boot drives for a couple years and no problems at all.

I did consider using mirrored HDDs at the very beginning. I have loads of old low capacity ones lying around from builds of yore. Went solid state though as don't want the heat and power draw of mechanical boot drives.

 

[A Bull With Yogurts]

I use 40 GB laptop drives for the boot drives. I connect a pair of them on the SATA controller built into the system board and have all the data drive connected to the SAS controllers (two of them) for 14 data drives, 7 on each controller. Works reliably and you can use smartmontools / smartctl to test and monitor the health of the boot drives much better because it returns useful diagnostics on an actual disk where the data returned from a SSD is not very useful and it won't even do USB. I have four servers (2 at home and 2 at work) that have been running this way with mirrored boot drives for a couple years and no problems at all.

Been thinking about this and decided to investigate getting a couple of low power, low temp, low noise 2.5" mechanical drives. I'm not spending more than £20 each though.

 

[Chris Moore]

Been thinking about this and decided to investigate getting a couple of low power, low temp, low noise 2.5" mechanical drives. I'm not spending more than £20 each though.

I got the ones I am using for $8 each plus shipping ...

 

[A Bull With Yogurts]

I got the ones I am using for $8 each plus shipping ...

Thanks for your suggestion. In the end I bought a couple of 120GB Hitachi CinemaStar HDDs for 30 quid. Really low power and silent.

The build was pretty painless and flashing the SAS9211-i4 worked without a hitch. The FreeNAS install was pleasantly quick and easy. I have the 2x 120GB drives in a mirror and the 8x 3TB drives in a RAIDZ2 array.

The CPU and RAM have passed their stress tests, and the data drives are currently undergoing their badblock tests.

All seems to be going swimmingly...of course it won't last. I haven't done a build yet where I haven't encountered at least one banana skin.

Next on my list:

(a) Work out how to configure a sensible profile for the case fans. They are currently going full tilt keeping the drives nice and cool around 28C, but making a right bloody racket in the process. Will need to dig into the mobo docs for this.

(b) Work out how to schedule SMART tests of the boot drives. I can see a scrub option under the system->boot tab, but the boot drives don't appear in any of the SMART test configs.

(c) Work out how to configure SSL web UI access, SSH access, ZPool encryption etc etc etc. The wife is out this evening so I have a few hours scheduled with the manual and couple of beers for company.

So, still a way to go, but getting there.

 

[danb35]

Work out how to schedule SMART tests of the boot drives.

It's under Tasks.

ZPool encryption

Don't.

 

[A Bull With Yogurts]

It's under Tasks.

Boot drives not listed.

Don't.

Why?

 

[danb35]

Boot drives not listed.

Oops, missed that. You're right, the GUI doesn't provide for a way to schedule SMART tests on the boot device(s). A cron job would do it, though.

Why?

Too many reports here of people losing their pools. Unless you have a particular legal or regulatory requirement to encrypt all your data, it's safer not to.

 

[Chris Moore]

(b) Work out how to schedule SMART tests of the boot drives. I can see a scrub option under the system->boot tab, but the boot drives don't appear in any of the SMART test configs.

So, still a way to go, but getting there.

I setup a cron job for each drive to run SMART tests on them. There is no menu option for it in the UI, for the SMART test on the boot drives, because they didn't anticipate people doing that. You can access setting up cron jobs through the WebUI and the commands are pretty straight forward. Are you familiar with them?
I run a long test every night kicked off at about 2 AM and a short test every day around 2 PM. The drives I am using are the 2.5" laptop drives in the 40GB variety and they have been putting along happily for almost 2 years now.

 

[danb35]

I run a long test every night

That seems excessive.