Hello FreeNAS World

[Inca Rhodes]

It's been a busy couple of weekends as I've read through the Forum How-To Guides, FreeNAS 4 N00bs, Installation, Sharing and "most" of the Manual as well as cyberjock's .ppt on VDevs...and newbie mistakes. I'm impressed with the FreeNAS environment and the quality of the information being provided to we N00bs (and those who are tackling issues I don't yet have a handle on). With FreeNAS I feel I've finally found the solution I've been looking for (and wasting entirely too much time and money on) trying to make my data "safer" than it has been while resting on an ever-expanding collection of hard drives.

I did a preliminary build with a handful of 500 GB drives to assure myself the environment is robust and to see how many mistakes I could make in a single weekend. After a few "rebuild and reconfigures" I got a bit bolder and built a larger install with 1 TB drives and satisfied myself that I could acclimate myself with the system well enough to fully commit myself to the task. So now I'm about 2 Hours away from pushing my hardware through a premeditated catastrophe (with "safe" data) to prove the hardware can survive an unexpected nightmare scenario resulting in replacing a size-limiting drive with a new larger drive, resilvering and resizing. When that's done, not only will I have the confidence that my data will be "safer", but that I understand this environment well enough to process and handle the inevitable failed drive.

Thanks to everyone who has shared their experience and insight into how to best work with FreeNAS and for helping the previous N00bs navigate this (new to me) environment. I think I'm going to really like FreeNAS and this Community!

Inca

 

[Inca Rhodes]

Build Update: I initially built this FreeNAS box with 10 2TB WD Green drives with 9 drives in RAIDZ plus 1 spare. During test writing I achieved 100 MB per sec writes to the array and I was really very impressed. Then, after about 45 minutes of sustained writing, one of the drives failed, which was a really good thing! The drive warranty will expire in March so it's an opportune time to RMA to WD.

I went through the process to offline the failed drive and replace with the spare and everything went smoothly. Much easier than I had anticipated and proved a real confidence builder for me. I put all of the drives through the WD DLG Quick, then Extended Tests to see if any others might also fail before rebuild. I rebuilt the box with the remaining 9 2TB Green drives and a 1TB Green drive for the next learning experience.

Using the 1TB drive as a size limiting factor along with 8 2TB drives, 1 2TB drive as the spare, I wrote about 6 TB of data to the 7TB dataset. I then took the 1TB drive offline and replaced it with a 3TB Red drive. This also was much easier than I had anticipated as the zpool size automatically increased to 14TB and started to resilver without any needed instruction or intervention on my part. Surely this is not the most "sane" thing to do, but it IS pushing all of my hardware to the extreme limits of my ability to push it, and is giving me the opportunity to learn how to handle the situation without having to worry about data loss due to inexperience.

Ultimately, I intend to replace all of the 2TB Green drives with new 3TB Red drives. I've Googled "FreeNAS Drive Replacement Acronis" to see if anyone has documented any experience in using Acronis to copy the image of a zpool member drive to a larger drive, resizing to the larger capacity of the new drive, installing into the FreeNAS box and booting. I haven't found anything similar (yet), but that will be my next learning experience after resilvering is completed.

Inca