High-speed wired connection directly to FreeNAS from laptop (USB, eSATA, etc.)

[trnelson]

This might be a dumb question so feel free to let me know if it is. :)

I have my FreeNAS server up and running. It's connected to the router via ethernet, and my laptops are all wireless, obviously. Say for example I wanted to connect to my FreeNAS server temporarily to do some reorganization of the files I have on there. Let's also say that one of the folders has a few thousand digital photos, each being roughly 20MB (loooool). Obviously doing this over the network, even via gigabit, is going to be painful. Even to preview a 20MB raw photo seems to take a couple of seconds.

So, my question is whether it's possible to directly mount a FreeNAS volume/dataset/drive as an external drive to my laptop, either via eSATA or USB. In other words, to have a high-speed direct cable connection to the FreeNAS volumes on a come-and-go basis.

Any thoughts?

 

[DrKK]

Let me say back what I *think* you're asking.

You're saying, you have a FreeNAS, one (or more) of the directories has a lot of 20MB+ heinous files that you want to rearrange subdirectories and what goes where and so on. You are concerned that if you do that from the laptop on Windows, then all of those will have to come up to your laptop and back to the NAS as you rearrange the files, and it will be horrifyingly slow?

If that's what you're saying, I think that's not correct. If you're moving files in a FreeNAS pool to other places in the same FreeNAS pool, the fact that you are doing it over the network shouldn't move the files through you as an intermediary. I am no SMB sensei, but I believe it's a simple matter to just tell the remote CIFS share to execute a rename, move, whatever request locally.

I would say: Proceed as you were.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you.

 

[cyberjock]

If that's what you're saying, I think that's not correct. If you're moving files in a FreeNAS pool to other places in the same FreeNAS pool, the fact that you are doing it over the network shouldn't move the files through you as an intermediary. I am no SMB sensei, but I believe it's a simple matter to just tell the remote CIFS share to execute a rename, move, whatever request locally.

It's actually same zfs pool or dataset. If you move them from one pool to another or one dataset to another they will move by transmitting your files one at a time across the network(aka really slow for what you want to do).

 

[trnelson]

Thanks guys for the replies! Admittedly I haven't actually really tried this yet so I'd need to try it to make sure. Part of the problem is that to organize some of these files, ideally I'd be able to "see" them. The directory I mentioned with all the files actually contains photos, so in order to organize them, I'd probably need to be able to see what I'm doing. Barring the ability to do that, one of my thoughts was to copy all the files to my laptop (overnight), rearrange them there, and then re-copy the organized files back to the server. Or, I could make notes of what files go where and move them via an SSH terminal, which I have done in the past.

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, you probably shouldn't be posting about some hypothetical situation you don't even know will happen....

 

[trnelson]

Not really hypothetical, cyberjock. I'm no stranger to working over a network... It's always a pain to work with a large number of large-ish files over a LAN. I'm not sure what the difference is (maybe none) but in the past when I've tried to delete or copy folders larger than several hundred megabytes over the network but on the same machine, it took forever. Maybe the key is that I was deleting or copying, and not moving. My point was simply that if there *was* a way to connect directly to the FreeNAS box with some sort of ultra-fast connection, it would make it much more tolerable.

That said, I did have a chance to jump on last night, and at least from my Macbook Pro over WIFI, moving files from one folder to another definitely happened all server side and didn't seem to be slowed down by the network. It was pretty painful to wait for the thumbnail previews to load for each image (CR2 raw format photos), but once they did they seemed to stay in the local file browser cache, so that's good. Moving files between folders was quick enough but because of the inherent network delays, you just need to be patient. Copying 100 files into a folder would look like it didn't work, then 10-15 seconds later the directory listing would refresh and you'd see that the files had moved. I just had to learn to be patient, but so far it's working better than expected. Slow, but definitely usable with some patience. :)

Just wanted to reply here so I could mark it as answered, just in case anyone came across this post. I was not able to find a solution for connecting directly to the FreeNAS box, but presumably over gigabit it should be fast enough.

Thanks guys.