Hello, and 'Am I in the right place?'

[Musicman9835]

Hi all, my name is Keith and I'm a network admin.

I'm a one-man IT solution in a small-medium sized company. Long story short, my predecessor had a darwin moment when he decided to expand our server room by using an electric saw to remove plaster and drywall, creating a toxic cloud of dust for the duration of 4 or 6 hours inside the server room, thus damaging anything and everything that had a cooling fan attached. Yes, all the equipment was running and uncovered ... The first thing to go was the tape backup drive.

Since it costs $4k roughly to replace the drive (at that time), I had decided to move our backup system to NAS. I bought two seagate blackarmor NAS devices with 4- 1TB drives, raid 5'd them, and set up the built in iSCSI drivers on our win 2008R2 server. In all, I got 2TB usable NAS storage, and made one a backup NAS, and the other an archive.

So, now, we're at capacity, so I talked to Seagate's support and yes my NAS can be upgraded to 3TB HDD's, but in reading more, I gather that the built-in iSCSI interface has a 2TB limit. Is that correct? It would explain why I only get 2TB when the device reports 2.68 available after raid striping.

Is FreeNAS a potential solution to this issue? I'm not looking to suit it to any odd configurations or VM or anything, just a simple network and hopefully a simple solution. I appreciate any input, thanks!

 

[cyberjock]

First: Just because your pool is 2.68TB has no bearing on your iSCSI size limit(at least not exactly). You can setup iSCSI with any size you want(I'll get to the 2TB limit in a second). I'm using about 100GB just to experiment with iSCSI. You could be getting only 2TB because that's all you setup for iSCSI.

As for the 2TB limit, I haven't heard of it on the forums before and I've been here 2 years. If memory serves me right I helped someone setup a 10TB iSCSI for a business about 2 months ago(might be confusing disk sizes). Maybe someone can step in and confirm or deny the 2TB limit. But, I don't think iSCSI is limited to 2TB for FreeNAS.

 

[pirateghost]

2TB limit on the Windows server is probably because you formatted it with MBR instead of GPT

Sent from my Nexus 5

 

[cyberjock]

I can confirm that someone has a 11.7TB iSCSI device and it does function appropriately.