Hi, new user (not really) exploring possibilities

[Makki]

Hi,

just a short introduction: IT-Business, had the "pleasure to play" with many storage-things (mostly rather big/expensive which doesn't imply being good..) in the past 20 years, being rather a "Debian-guy" in the past years.
Then hit FreeNAS about a year ago once again, was very pleased with the iSCSI-performance and the ease of use.
So as it works fine for about 3months now (ESXi with SAS, superduper-HW with 4 TB), I'd go further and use it at home.
But I'll explain that in my next post..

Michael

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Welcome!

 

[Makki]

As the other thread was closed: I just don't accept "you cannot!" as answer without a WHY?
possible ZFS-corruption with less than 8GB RAM is a simple explanation which I accept;
(though ZFS/Freenas should then completely refuse to accept the Job instead of telling "you should not..", my opinion!)

-> I'll go ahead with a HP ProLiant MicroServer (Gen8, G1610T, ..) and 16GB RAM which will be fed with my existing pretty new 4x2TB WD-NAS-disks currently in the 8y old to be replaced Syno (which btw worked for 8yrs very well in RAID1/10 including a failed disk - but it's slow and I had very bad other experiences with bigger models..) + 256GB Samsung 750 SSD (as cache maybe, dont know yet but it's existing as spare anyway and unused), if it saturizes 1GBe I'm done anyway for 3-5yrs.
If I need more space or the disks start to fail, I'll replace them with 4+TB by time one by one but 6TB net is more than enough for 2016-2018.

BTW, the HP: It's pretty cheap currently (178€ + 2x8GB RAM) which sounds like a good minimalistic solution here (I know it's not perfect! PS, no AES-NI [which I dont need], Broadcom-LAN, would also prefer Intel [with or without Freenas!] but that also wasn't the target at home to be 100% perfect..)
At home it should be sufficient with redudant USB boot-sticks, RAIDZ on four identical disks, mainly just a reliable (Backup) storage. The Data is kept local but I recently had a workstation with a broken RAM - it took me weeks to even think of that-> thats horrible! Never again without ECC!

Availability is not an issue here, Data-Integrity IS an issue.
Thats a main reason to stay with FreeNAS., although I could not be done with my preffered Platform (APU2 which is really far away from "Consumer-HW" as assumed btw..)

Michael

P.S.: I would have even bought a FreeNAS Mini, but a lousy, buggy ASRock killing itself by time for $1.000 is - given your (good) requirements and very high recommendations then also somewhat out of bounds.
And 19" (I have a rack in my cellar!) is out due to noise, cost, power and mostly unreliable 2.5" High-end" disks (they die faster than you could replace them IMHO), I have no space constraints, so what..

 

[Stux]

FWIW, U4 update notes mention a 'fix' for the BMC flash failure issue.

I think the fix is to write 60x less, which means failure in 60 years rather than 12 months ;)

 

[Ericloewe]

I think it actually sets up the watchdog to disable the timer, which makes the patting non-destructive. Renders it useless, too.

The real fix will have to come from ASRock.