I Goofed - Live and Learn

[BKK]

I'm new to FreeNAS. I setup up my system to act as a Plex server and to also host backups from the home PCs. My experience is limited to building desktop PCs. When I studied Engng back in the day I did some Fortran!! programming on some Unix workstations as well.

I got a bee in my bonnet and wanted to put together a NAS. I tried Amahi. I didn't expect things to go smoothly but after putting in several hours I decided to walk. The docs are poor and there is not much in the way of community support in my experience.

After looking around I decided to give FreeNAS a try. It took me a few days to get FreeNAS up and running, there were a few hurdles, but some extra hours and a little help from the community and its up and running.

So I've now realized I made a pretty major GOOF! I went out and bought a desktop MB, CPU and non ECC RAM. I've been doing some reading on the threads in this forum and now realize what a mistake I made. I wish I would have done my home work first! I can't afford to ditch what I have right now, maybe in the new year. I have UPS connected also. What scares me is corruption introduced by my non ECC ram which from what I've read can go undetected.

So my question is aside from doing the recommended mtce scrubs, SMART, etc is there anything else I can do short of a backup of the Volume??

When I do buy a real MB and RAM would it be possible to swap out the old components and connect my drives to the new leaving the Volume drives as is??

Live and learn! I realize its not a secure setup but I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that it'll survive the next 6 months until I can get the new components!

 

[danb35]

Depending on the CPU you chose, it may support ECC--you may only need a new mobo/RAM. If your RAM is good to begin with (I presume/hope you tested it thoroughly with memtest before using it in production), the odds are good that you'll be safe. It doesn't give you the extra security of ECC, but your pool isn't going to instantly fall over and die just because you didn't use ECC memory.

When you get your new motherboard and RAM, your current boot drives should transfer over without a problem.

 

[leenux_tux]

Depending on how much data you have to backup as an interim/temp fix I would, if you have one available, connect an external hard drive (usb3 or eSATA will be less painful) to a laptop or pc , make sure your files on your freenas box are shared (CIFS?) and copy as much as you can to that drive over the network. If your using windows try "robocopy" as the copy mechanism. It has some very flexible command line arguments and is a great little tool for creating backups.

 

[BKK]

I'll be replacing CPU/RAM and MB. In the meantime I've decided to shut down those nights when its not in use.

 

[cyberjock]

You do realize that by doing so you are robbing FreeNAS of its ability to do it's own scheduled maintenance that are scheduled at various nights throughout the month as well as monthly maintenance?

 

[Knowltey]

I'm new to FreeNAS. I setup up my system to act as a Plex server and to also host backups from the home PCs. My experience is limited to building desktop PCs. When I studied Engng back in the day I did some Fortran!! programming on some Unix workstations as well.

I got a bee in my bonnet and wanted to put together a NAS. I tried Amahi. I didn't expect things to go smoothly but after putting in several hours I decided to walk. The docs are poor and there is not much in the way of community support in my experience.

After looking around I decided to give FreeNAS a try. It took me a few days to get FreeNAS up and running, there were a few hurdles, but some extra hours and a little help from the community and its up and running.

So I've now realized I made a pretty major GOOF! I went out and bought a desktop MB, CPU and non ECC RAM. I've been doing some reading on the threads in this forum and now realize what a mistake I made. I wish I would have done my home work first! I can't afford to ditch what I have right now, maybe in the new year. I have UPS connected also. What scares me is corruption introduced by my non ECC ram which from what I've read can go undetected.

So my question is aside from doing the recommended mtce scrubs, SMART, etc is there anything else I can do short of a backup of the Volume??

When I do buy a real MB and RAM would it be possible to swap out the old components and connect my drives to the new leaving the Volume drives as is??

Live and learn! I realize its not a secure setup but I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that it'll survive the next 6 months until I can get the new components!

If the desktop hardware is anything at all decent you can probably recoup most if not all of your costs by selling it off. (in parts or as a whole) and then using that money to get the ECC compatible parts. Also, is any of t ECC compatible, there are some desktop processors (Pentium G#### series, and some i3-#### processors) that are ECC compatible given the correct motherboard. You can always check that out on the Intel ARK to see what you have there.

You'd be surprised at what you can make on the old parts. I managed to sell an old LGA775 motherboard I had laying around a few months ago for more than I bought it for new off of eBay. (Just enough to cover the eBay fee though)

Also, yeah as the others have said. Don't do the nightly shutdown. It won't help, and in fact may be harmful as it makes it more difficult for FreeNAS to do the tests that it needs to do to ensure data integrity. You can still get some security out of non-ECC with ZFS over other filesystem in regards to bitflips and bit rot on the drives, just that you are still at risk with the non-ECC in terms of anything going wrong in RAM.

A good middle ground to shutting off every night though would be to just power off every couple nights or so, maybe once a week or every other week and boot into MemTest and run that over night. Your real vulnerability is in the memory, so might as well use that scheduled downtime productively by having the server checking it's RAM sticks rather than just having it sitting doing nothing.

 

[jgreco]

Bonus points ought to be awarded for best title of the day. Whatever you end up doing, it suggests you'll be fine in the end, because you can teach yourself.

Of course we strongly encourage ECC for all those reasons you now know about. But quite frankly don't totally freak out about it. You just want to be aware that there's some level of risk. As the first response indicated, "the odds are good you'll be safe."

 

[anodos]

I realize its not a secure setup but I'm going to keep my fingers crossed that it'll survive the next 6 months until I can get the new components!

It's hard to quantify the risk of using non-ECC RAM. You should be fine until you are able to upgrade, but it would be good not to put it off too long. As with any setup, make sure you keep good backups (and make sure to verify that your backups are good).

 

[Knowltey]

(and make sure to verify that your backups are good).

Yes, this is one of the main points to take away. One of the primary issues with non-ECC is that if it does cause damage those changes can be sent on to the backup without your awareness. When I was myself running non-ECC for a while while pending upgrade I made sure to browse around in my backup for a while after it was made just to make sure that everything was still there. I was also keeping a running backup of sorts on my main computer as well that contained all of the data on my NAS from before it was originally put on the NAS, and then running updates of anything else later added shortly after it was added.