Greetings from Texas

[Bigtexun]

Howdy ya'll!

I'm an engineer from Texas. Communications, Internet technologies, and *nix engineering are my specialties. I'm a complete noob, with regard to FreeNAS. However I started with FreeBSD, as a replacement for the commercial BSDI I used extensively. I'm not sure the year, '95 or '96 perhaps. Back then we were building terminal servers for our dialup modem banks.

My first NAS box was based on a FreeBSD beta that had experimental ZFS support... I built a large array of cheap drives for a backup system, when tapes just couldn't keep up. I've also got a Nexenta NAS serving Iscsi to a couple of VMware servers... That has been rock solid, but it is on enterprise hardware, spinning some rather expensive drives. I've been eyeing FreeNAS ever since I finished it.

So this isn't my first Rodeo.

In my day job I work with Internet technologies for a company that makes commercial products for the large service providers. So I work with a lot of the same technologies in a commercial environment, that I am here to experience with FreeNAS. In my free time, I do things like automate the bbq pit with a beaglebone and put it on the Internet, so that I can watch the temperature of my brisket while I run to the store for beer.

My FreeNAS build will be based on re-using a $1500 computer case I have owned since 2000. It is a large server case with drawers for 2 maximum-size motherboards, so it can hold nearly all form factors. It boasts support for up to 8 standard power supplies, 36 5.25" hard drives, and was incredibly heavy before I stripped it down to gut it of old parts, to make room for the new. So it has lots of nice room for things like hot-swap drive backplanes...

I'm thinking that one drawer will hold a FreeNAS system, and the other will be a Mythbuntu system. Normally I would just build custom systems, based on FreeBSD and Ubuntu, however I like the idea of tracking these open source projects, as they will do most of the hard work for me. After all, I'm not getting paid to build this, this is for relaxation... Nothing more relaxing than letting someone else do your engineering heavy-lifting. I get to just enjoy. The only downside to a project like this is that the plugins might be a couple revisions older than what I could have in a manually installed FreeBSD system, which is not a problem unless there is a new feature you want. But most package management systems for linux distributions have the same problem, so I'm cutting slack for that.

For my first taste of FreeNAS, I simply stacked some drives on top of one of my linux systems, move drive cables around temporarily, and booted off a USB flash stick. There I got an idea of how things were going to work, and fit together. No streaming video tests yet, this was just a chance to play around with the UI, and decide if FreeNAS was up to par. Seems to be!

So for the real build, I'm going with a Asrock C2750D41. I know there are mixed opinions about this motherboard. My take on this is after several years experience with custom processors for video processing. I have seen some really cheap slow machines process video better than xeon based systems. The chips I work with at work have very little horsepower, use almost no power, yet handle full resolution video at high bit rates with ease. That is what I want, low power consumption, flawless performance. Yeah, this build won't be feeding iSCSI to a VM server, all it has to do is one stream of transcoding, and perhaps a couple video streams, and some utility storage fuctions such as being the archive point for my various system backups.

Hard drives will be the most power hungry part of the system, and I *hope* I'm able to spin those down and keep the whole system in a low-power mode, when it is idle, which is a good 70% of the day. At the end of the day, the NAS is for me, and the streaming media library is for my wife. That they live in the same box is just a bonus. Mythbunto, on the other hand, is going to be my wife's machine, and my pain in the ass... I expect much more work there than with FreeNAS.

Of course, now that I'm telling people about the plan, things will change and it will all come together in a different way... So don't hold me to any of this.

Once I have a solid build running, I'll be playing with various STB's, ranging from a Roku, to raspberry pi. I expect an android based STB will be the likely favorite, once prototyping is done, and I start spending money on new STB's. I have a couple manufacturers in China constantly trying to send me some sample google STB's that look really promising, and are about 1 generation newer than the boxes for sale now on Amazon (so they will probably be buggy too...).

So try not to byte my head off in the forums for not using StuperMicro... I have my reasons. I have my FILL of stupermicro at work, and I'm not real happy about them. I mean, they are on-par with Dell, and have some really nice rack servers on paper... But out of the box they are nowhere near as solid as my real enterprise class machines. I'm sure Stupermicro is better than Asrock for many reasons... But I see some reasons Asrock will be better for ME.

 

[Yatti420]

Well for power consumption I draw about 60 watts.. Nothing really.. I really don't think an atom board will save much on top of this.. As for hardware I use a supermicro board and have had zero issues with it other then the IPMI upgrade process etc.. As for an asrock board with intergrated atom I would say avoid it if you need something you can upgrade in the future.. As for spinning down disks the sytem log is now on the pool aswell as samba information so spinning down I don't think is really a possibility anymore with FreeNAS.. Or it may spindown and spin right back up..

 

[Bigtexun]

Well, so far the direct measured power consumption, based on DC current measurements, is a lot lower than I thought, so much so that I need to confirm my measurements. So far I have been encoding in a way that transcoding has not been required, so I don't have any heavy load measurements. But I don't fully trust the DC current measurements from my clamp-on measurements, so I'm going to work on that before I publish a number... but WITH the drives I'm well below the 60 watts you have. But I have to remember that other DVR's I've worked with only used 15 watts under full load, recording multiple simultaneous streams, with idle currents dropping well into the single digits... So I shouldn't be expecting the consumption to be very high. Low power also means low heat, so everything we do to get the power down means we need less cooling inside AND outside the box. I see you are in Ontario, so for you adding to the ambient heat is less of an issue. Texas where we have to cool the house in the winter, and prevent it from just bursting into flames in the summer (I jest, but not by much). So low power means adding less load to the already overworked household cooling systems.

I did add a fan to get my CPU core temp down, it tended to hover around 60*c, and with a tiny 1.25" fan, I'm close to ambient.

What board/cpu/drive combination are you using?

And you are right about samba and system logs. That is why you create a tiered set of filesystems, so some can idle while others are in continuous use. I know not everyone can do tiers, it is only practical for larger systems. But if you have enough drives to have multiple filesystems because you exceed the 12 drive limit, then it becomes easier to talk about filesystem tiers.

So I'm still working on my build, but so far it seems pretty solid.

 

[Bigtexun]

Oh, and I should mention... I very nearly kicked FreeNAS to the curb over some compatibility issues, and just went with a FreeBSD system that can do everything and more. I'm really wanting an appliance, rather than yet another *nix system to administer. So my build rules are I stick with FreeNAS until I feel compelled to customize something, and if I customize, it will be on a FreeBSD system.

I had originally planned a mythbuntu system to occupy the same chassis, but after getting my wife up to speed customizing plex, we discussed the Mythbuntu system, and agreed it should probably live in the living room where she can administer it. She also, on her own, discovered that our TV's, and blu-ray players can all access the plex library without running the plex client. So she skipped right past the trials I had planned for researching STB's. We have one Roku, and it has a plex app, so that was pretty easy, and I put the plex app on my iPhone, which automatically caused it to appear on my wife's phone and iPad, so we had our media server playing on every device in the house in one day, my wife can hardly contain herself. She spent the day Sunday learning to organize plex, install custom fan art for the titles Plex can't find, connecting random devices to plex, and learning to rip. It will take us a while to get through our DVD collection. Once it is done, we will divert our attention to our music collections. she has a massive digital music collection, and we both have a large pile of CD's. We have vinyl too, but I'm /not/ going to digitize vinyl...

Since Mythbuntu will live in a different chassis, I am free to use the rest of my server chassis to build something else... I don't know if it will be a FreeBSD system, a different NAS solution, or something else entirely. If nothing else, the extra space will be where I build the /next/ appliance in 5 years when it is time to refresh this build.