FreeNAS on a HP xw6200

[xxtoni]

Greetings,

This is my first try with FreeNAS so please bear with me.

I've learned of FreeNAS a few years back and wanted to do something with it for quite some time now but because my main business doesn't require a lot of storage I never had the motivation to do so until now. One of my businesses is design and so far we've used external hard drives for our storage needs (both primary storage and backup) and so far we have around 2TB of main data which we host on one drive and use another drive as a backup. The current disks that we have are almost filled up again and I don't really want to buy more external hard drives. I feel it's time to get properly setup in regards to storage.

NAS

I've been thinking about getting a NAS for a year or so because I was worried about our data, most of it is images design work so if we lose we would basically lose al our previous client work. I haven't switched to a NAS so far because the cost always turned me away. Solutions like QNAP seem great but also very expensive and somewhat limited. Recently I've taken a look at Lacie's NAS solution and while the price is acceptable it's also somewhat limited. The Lacie NAS I looked at has 5 disk bays and while that would usually be enough if used with 3TB drives an acquaintance of mine offered me 10x1TB drives at $65 each, which is a great price (I'm not in the U.S.).

My first thought was to build a NAS. Problem is that I can't really find a U2 case anywhere locally and I'd have to buy the motherboard and RAID card on eBay and wait for it to arrive. Looking around the office I remembered an old workstation I had lying around, a HP xw6200 and it occurred to me that I could turn that into a NAS.

The only problem I've encountered so far is that the motherboard on the xw6200 only has 2 SATA ports which isn't nearly enough considering that I want to use 1TB drives, I'd want to connect at least 4-5 drives.

RAID Controller

After doing a bit of research I found that one way to expand the storage capacity of a motherboard with limited SATA ports was through a raid controller. I quickly looked around the FreeNAS wiki and found a list of supported controllers, the only problem is that most of the ones I looked up are really expensive - $400+. For that amount I could buy a whole NAS. I'd appreciate some general advice regarding running FreeNAS on a machine like the xw6200, if you'd recommend that I don't do it altogether and some suggestions for a RAID controller (or something else that is better for my needs).

Future Setup

As mentioned because this data is irreplaceable I want to secure it the best way I can. Here is the solution I want to setup in the near future.

Main storage: NAS

The main storage of data for our company will be on the NAS. 3-4 machines will access the NAS (2-3 Windows, 1 Mac) and all of the data will be stored on it. Over time, if the need arrises we'd probably build or buy something more suitable for a NAS, something like a blade server.

Backup

I've considered all sorts of things for long-term backup like: tape (too expensive), burning the data onto Blu-Ray disks (too expensive, not reliable enough), copying the data onto hard drives and storing them offsite (kinda expensive, not really reliable, or at least so I was told). So after going through all of these options a friend suggested that these days it's best to use the cloud for long-term storage. I've recently read about Amazon Glacier and while the price is right the problem for us is that our upload connection isn't nearly fast enough to upload 2-4TB of data. It would take 1 whole year of uploading 24/7 to upload 1TB of data so obviously that wasn't an option, but I had an idea. I know some people at a local ISP, I could encrypt the data and give the disks to them, they have fast connections so 4TB of data could be uploaded in a few weeks time. So this could be an option, haven't looked into it further but it seems the best so far. If you have suggestions for long-term storage I'd certainly appreciate it

For short-term storage I'd just use external-hard drives hooked up to the NAS.


I want to thank everyone in advance for their help.

Best Regards
Toni

 

[cyberjock]

RAID Controller - everyone continues to ask this question over and over. If you had searched you'd find that the IBM M1015 is 'the' controller for FreeNAS. $100 or so gets you 8 SATA ports.

Backups - We had a thread about cloud based backups a few weeks ago. The ability to upload as well as download is the big killer. If you have TB of data trying to move it from/to the cloud is difficult. I wouldn't even bother trying to backup TB of data to a cloud. I'd build a second low power FreeNAS system(Intel Atom with 8GB of RAM) and just backup with ZFS's snapshots and replication. The Atom will be slow, 30MB/sec or so, but it WILL get the job done and is cheap.

Using USB external hard drives hooked up to the NAS can be... a challenge. For one, FreeBSD doesn't have great support for anything except UFS and ZFS. For two, FreeNAS doesn't really like it when you attach and detach hard drives. While it sounds all great in theory, it really doesn't work out that well in practice.

The xw6200 has either a Broadcom or Intel NIC(depending on the build). Broadcom are notorious for not working with FreeBSD. So you may find yourself buying an Intel NIC very soon to add to the machine.

THe xw6200 appears to support 8GB of RAM. You should put 8GB of RAM in it if it doesn't have that much already. Definitely do NOT go below 6GB. Need some good horror stories search for "poor performance" and "kernel panic". That'll help you change your mind.

The xw6200 isn't new hardware. Being that it uses old Xeon-P4s I'm not sure what kind of performance you can expect if you try to use RAIDZ or RAIDZ2. If you were going to use mirror RAID then you'll be fine. If RAIDZ or RAIDZ2 was your plan you may need to reconsider your plan or get a whole new system.

If you are hoping to make this a long-term setup you may be better off just building(or buying) a whole new system. That system is getting old and may see a hardware failure soon. While its super easy to migrate a zpool and config to a new machine if you don't want the hassle you may just want to get new hardware and be done with it. I googled the model number and found several places selling the xw6200 for less than $200. Of course, you could also take the opportunity to buy a second machine and do a primary/backup type setup with the exact same hardware. :P Be sure that the hardware does what you want performance-wise before buying the second machine though.

 

[xxtoni]

Hello,

First of all thank you very much for your reply. Goes a long way.

Roger on the controller.

What about offsite though ? We have several 100k of equipment in our building and if the place burned down or someone robbed it, it would certainly be a blow to us...the data is to some degree more important, as it's irreplaceable. I know from experience that in a robbery one of the first things that get stolen are computers, cameras more or less stuff that is (or at least appears to be) easy to sell. For offsite my main idea so far was getting the initial upload done on a high speed connection and then updating the changes from our own connection. Another thing I considered is just mailing the drives to Amazon. They have a service that let's you do that called AWS Import/Export but I'd love to hear what someone with more experience would do in this scenario.

Understood in regards to the external drives hooked up to the FreeNAS box.

Yea, my idea was since I already have that PC lying around and it seems to have decent enough specs for a NAS (it's a 3.0Ghz single core Xeon and 4gigs of RAM) I could just buy the drives and a controller and set it up until it reaches it's limits. Once the limits are reached I thought I could just build/buy a new machine, migrate the controller and drives onto that machine and just use the xw6200 as a winter sled :)

On that note, the main reason I'm going with FreeNAS is because I'd rather not buy a NAS for $500 that has 4-5 bays and then once those are full I have to buy another, bigger one and so ad infinitum, so basically trading time for money. When building the machine, is there any reason for going with: U2 vs tower, Xeon vs i5/7 ? Sorry for the questions, you've probably answered them a million times but I really want to do this right first time around. I'll take a look around the forum to see what kind of builds others are using as well,

Once again thank you for your time, really appreciated.

 

[cyberjock]

As for offsite, that's really your own decision to make. If you are going to store it in the cloud keep in mind you will have to maintain it with constant updates as well as look at how you would recover. If you have TBs of data you may have problems getting access to that data in a reasonable period of time.

I'd never mail drives to Amazon(or anywhere else). If your data is that important you could easily just take an encrypted drive home with you and keep it in your basement or something. If someone steals it from your house its no big deal, you just buy another drive. One company I know had a separate building on the premises and they ran wireless from one building to the other. I'm not talking about home wifi, this was about $200 in commercial grade stuff with speeds of about 100Mb/sec. They made the initial backup over ethernet, then did everything else by wifi. If your main server crashes you just move your backup server to your main building and do the restore over ethernet. My problems with the cloud:

1. Your data will never be as important to anyone else as it is to you.
2. It's not locally accessible.
3. You have no control over who has access to the data.

Depending on how much data you are talking about changing all the time you could even do snapshots to your home and just keep the backup server at home. You'd need the initial snapshot to be taken locally of course. The snapshots would only be the size of your changed files. If you only changed 300MB worth of files, only 300MB of data would be needed to be backed up again.

Honestly though, if your data is really this important I'm not sure why you aren't looking to build a NAS exactly how you want it. You have 2TB of data and haven't mentioned how much data you will accumulate per unit of time, but I have to think if you bought a 5 bay server you'd get a respectable lifetime out of it. Look at how long your old machine has lasted!

My system can handle up to 24 drives and uses a Norco RPC-4224. You should be able to build a 24 port system with no drives for about $1000 tops. Then buy whatever size drives you want in whatever quantity you want.

 

[xxtoni]

I think you're right.

I've been taking a drive home so far and had no problems. I think NAS+backup in office+backup at home is the solution.

The snapshot idea sounds great, haven't considered doing snapshots to home, that's really something.

The reason I've just been adding up external drives around instead of getting a NAS is because it was always easier. I'd go out and just buy a drive or two and use one as the main disk and just backup to the other one. I think that a 5bay NAS would probably last us 2 or so years but that solution costs $500-600 diskless, considering that a 24 port system should be around $1k it doesn't seem like much of a competition.

But yea I've definitely decided on the off-site solution and now just to decide whether I should just buy one or build a NAS. I think that I'm actually creating a problem for myself because I do want to build one of these and just tinker around with them, even if just buying a prebuilt solution would get the job done. On a similar note what do you think of just getting something like a few-year-old U2 blade and filling it with drives ?

 

[cyberjock]

I've bought some used blades. To me it seems like if you want to save ALOT of money you are going to buy pre i7 stuff, which you probably don't want because of RAM limitations. The old-but-still-good i7 stuff is cheaper than new i7 stuff, but imo not enough to not want to just buy brand new.

Building yourself can save you some money. If you are looking for more than 5-6 drives you can save a boatload of money building yourself. It just depends on how many ports you want....

 

[xxtoni]

Used blades was just a thought.

If I'm going to built it's gonna be between 8-12 drives. Currently thinking between building vs buying something prebuilt.

Anyway thanks for your time and some fantastic tips, I really appreciate it and I know how annoying it can be answering the same things all day long. Thanks for the great advice!

Regards

Toni