Hello and a question

[kameleon]

Hello all. I am new to FreeNAS and have a few questions. I am currently redoing my server arrangements in my home office and need some help on which route to go on the file server side. Here is my hardware:

Intel C2D 8400 (dual core 3.0Ghz)
6GB ram
8x 1TB sata 7200rpm drives (roughly 50/50 mix of Samsung and WD drives)
onboard single gigabit ethernet

That is what I have for my file server now. The motherboard has 6 sata ports onboard and I have 2 identical PCI-e 1x single sata port adapters for the other two. The addon cards are Silicon Images controllers so they are widely supported. I am wanting to setup the file server so that I can attach storage to my proxmox ve server for my virtual machines. Also it will be centralized storage for my media and such. With that iSCSI and NFS/CIFS will need to be supported. Eventually I would like to replace all the 1tb drives with 2tb or even 3tb drives, hopefully without having to redo the entire box.

Now for my dilemma. I am torn between FlexRAID and FreeNAS. I have used FlexRAID in windows before and like it (with a single parity drive). I like that it only powers up the drives that need to be powered up, can recover data off the drives separate from the FlexRAID server, can upgrade drives to bigger sizes easily, etc. However I really would like the de-duplication features and other "ZFS" stuff like thin provisioning in FreeNAS. However the way I read there is no easy way to upgrade storage in FreeNAS. Either route I go I would like to run it off of my 8GB CF card on IDE adapter so that it doesn't touch my available space on the storage drives.

In your opinion, which would be the best route for me to go, and why? Thanks in advance.

 

[xbmcg]

well, as always, it depends on many things.
flexRAID is nt really an alternative to a real raid setup, it is more for static data. The advantage is, you can pull any drive and place it on another machine and you will have access to all data stored on it.in case of disasters, that can happen - even with your parity drive you can lose data. The older your snapshot is, the more likely you may destroy some of your files - even if they have not been changed since last snapshot.

a regular raid on a good raid controller has often the option of live raid migration / upgrade. that means you can add drives and they will be integrated in your arrays, you can migrate from raid0 > raid1 > raid 5... Examples are the HighPoint RocketRaid controllers with 8 or 16 sata 3 lanes / SAS. The advantage is, they run on any os.

now to the next level. freeBSD / Solaris zfs. The higher the version, the more features it has and the better the integration in windows environments.
Advantages are: a massive file system with no boundaries (zetabyte), redundancy to the max, raid-levels from raid1, raid5 (single parity stripe), raid 6 (double parity stripe), raid6++ (tripple parity stripe), hotspare support, independent read and write caches based on (mirrored) SSD's if you need it, parity checks on data sectors to detect and heal data rott from ageing, fast recovery / resilvering after drive replacement (file based, not drive based), multiple copies of important data, you can add your filesystems on virtual volumes, having quota and guaranteed space, if you wish, there is also compression, deduplication and encryption, automatic snapshots / shadow copies, so you can go back in time and restore the data to an earlier state, or restore single files, efficient remote backup / synchronous / asynchronous mirroring even over WAN lines (only changed blocks are transferred), nfs, iSCSI etc.

now to the issues. all products out there seem to be unfinished. The most advanced freenas is the alpha build in fn7.5.1 (zfs v28), the fn7 has more features and more information to the user, while the fn8 is more polished. the services in fn8.0.3 have some bugs regarding snapshots/shadow copies (zfs v15) and there is no ui for recovery, fn7 is more mature (around for several years, zfs v14) has more options, but is also not yet finished. There are also other approaches up to open solaris / openindiana with the latest zfs v28, build 151 - the latest free version so far, with more or less gui support - on the other side is the commercial solaris with proprietary crypto-capabilities and data center background.

The drawback on those features is - they need ressources. Deduplication is one of the biggest ressource black-holes, it takes 1 to 2 GB Ram per TB diskspace. on the other hand, if you just run a raid1 or a raidz (raid5), you can do this with cheep atom / 2-4G RAM easily in a soho environment (~2-10 User).

so in your case I would pack all drives to a big volume with raidz or raidz2 - if your goal is to squeeze as much as posible TB out of the drives by decent security.
Then I would create the virtual volumes for your iSCSI needs and the zfs data sets for the regular sharing. personally I would prefer mirroring, so I have more independent smaller zpools, that I can upgrade pairwise to higher capacities (pull one drive, plug in a bigger ones, resilver, pull the other one add the 2nd big drive, resilver, clear and you have extended live the capacity of that pool. you can do it also with your raidz, but then you have to replace all drives one by one, before you get the new capacity.

 

[kameleon]

Thanks for the reply. I am good replacing each of the drives one by one just as long as it is possible to upgrade them in place. I really do like the zfs featureset of FreeNAS, mostly the thin provisioning and de-duplication. One more question, should I be ok with just the single ethernet adapter in this machine? And what would be the best way to "install" this? I currently am testing it on a 8GB USB thumb drive but I have that 8GB CF card I could run it off of. I would like my settings to be persistent between reboots.

 

[ProtoSD]

I really do like the zfs featureset of FreeNAS, mostly the thin provisioning and de-duplication.

Just to clear up any confusion, FreeNAS does not have de-duplication. FreeNAS uses ZFS v15, de-dupe isn't available until ZFS v28. FreeNAS will probably have v28 later this year.