Hello - New FreeNAS server based on HP ProLiant N54L

[kinetic]

Hey guys,

This looks like a great resource for learning FreeNAS.

I have a HP ProLiant N54L and I'm seeking to run a NAS on it. Currently it is configured with 2GB of RAM with FreeNAS running on a USB stick.

After reading about RAID configurations I'm considering whether I really need to be concerned with that.

My main objective is to have music, movies (720p via PLEX) and photos (RAW) stored centrally for access from multiple devices. Those devices are my Mac laptop, RaspPi streaming from the NAS via Volumio and an AppleTV2 with Plex Client.

I currently have everything on hard drives that are formatted as HFS (Mac) so need to figure out how to migrate the data onto the NAS setup once I've decided which path to follow.

If anyone would like to chip in with some tips and advice, I'd really appreciate the input. I've been reading up on the manual and the forums to try and familiarise myself before I jump in too far. I'd like to do the right thing from the start to protect my data.

My thoughts are to essentially run the drives normally as separate entities (i.e. no RAID setups) and back up the important stuff (photos, etc).

 

[Nindustries]

Welcome to the forums!
You can start by reading the hardware requirements. If you want to use ZFS, you're going to need 8GB at least.

Greetings

 

[kinetic]

Thank you for your reply.

I've been looking into RAID ZFS and I am baffled as to why I would want it. From what I can see it's mainly to increase performance and data integrity, but with a higher risk of failure, as you're relying on two drives instead of one. For this reason, I'm not sure why I'd want to spend the cash to buy extra RAM plus a second hard drive for each pair.

I can see where the performance might be justified for business use, but for me I'm thinking a simple dumb NAS with single drives mounted might be okay. Am I off track here or does this sound sensible for my needs?

 

[Nindustries]

I do think you're a bit off track there. RAID is there for data integrity. You can read up about RAID at Wikipedia.
ZFS is safer for your data than regular UFS filesystems, but you can get away with UFS ofcourse.
People start to use RAID because they got a lot of drives full of data they don't want to lose.

Greetings

 

[gpsguy]

With just 2Gb of RAM, you'll have to settle with using UFS formatted disks. ZFS on FreeNAS requires a minimum of 8Gb of RAM. Contrary to HP's information, you can put 16Gb in it. I'm using this RAM in mine and it boots to 16Gb every time.

Kingston 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333
ECC Unbuffered Server Memory Model KVR1333D3E9SK2/16G

 

[kinetic]

I think it's going to be an ongoing project, I'll start with single discs and move to a RAID config later on when I have the money to upgrade the RAM and get the extra hard drives. :)

 

[scurrier]

Keep in mind that RAID (as opposed to RAIDZ) is for when you need to be able to withstand a hard drive failure, while still keeping your data "up" and available. If you don't need to keep it available, then you can survive with only using backups.

RAIDZ (as opposed to normal RAID and implying use of the ZFS file system) is for when you want to keep your data available and also to provide automatic healing of errors that the hard drive cannot recover from itself. For example, you go to look at a picture on your RAIDZ and the hard drive returns an error saying that a block cannot be read. ZFS will automatically go to the redundant block on another drive, read that, and remap/replace the bad block on the first drive.

Don't forget that "RAID is not a backup." Neither RAID nor RAIDZ will not save you from files destroyed by viruses, by accidental deletion, catastrophic power failures, or gnomes stealing your server in the night. Only backup can protect against these.

 

[scurrier]

One clarification: I *think* that other non-RAIDZ RAID implementations can do some degree of self-healing like I describe in my RAIDZ paragraph above. I'm not sure though. One distinction of RAIDZ from normal RAID, though, is that RAIDZ can detect silent errors through its error detection scheme. So, if your hard drive is able to do a read operation, but the checksum indicates that something funny happened and the data does not have integrity, RAIDZ will heal it. As opposed to normal RAID where it will just assume that the data is good because the hard drive was able to read it without returning an error.

 

[scurrier]

A comment on your 2GB of ram:
There are very strong warnings against not having enough RAM, if you read around on this forum. Look around and read the stickies. People lose their data even though things appear to be looking OK.... until it's lost. At least that's the conventional wisdom I have read around here. I believe the higher RAM requirement is related to ZFS only. Please read the manual or other sources to confirm, though. Just wanted to highlight this to you... assumptions you might hold for a normal computer may not hold for a FreeNAS box.

 

[gpsguy]

NOTE: a ZFS volume is required to use Plugins. If you have created a UFS volume, you will need to
instead use Jails to install additional software.

 

[gpsguy]

NOTE: a ZFS volume is required to use Plugins. If you have created a UFS volume, you will need to
instead use Jails to install additional software.

 

[kinetic]

Interesting. Thanks guys, a lot of food for thought. :)

 

[kinetic]

Hey guys. I ended up getting 16GB of ECC Unbuffered RAM (Kingston) for my N54L so it should run tops now. I plan to run two Seagate NAS 3TB's in a RAID1 (via the inbuilt RAID capability) and then have two other non-essential drives not in a RAID config.

 

[gpsguy]

Now that you have sufficient RAM, go ahead and create a ZFS mirror with your 2 - 3Tb drives. The "inbuilt" RAID, is "fake RAID". FreeNAS isn't supported on fake RAID.