Importing NTFS partitions

[_Adrian_]

Hey guys...

Been messing with the idea of migrating from W2012DC to FreeNAS.

I currently have installed FreeNAS onto a USB Jump Drive and trying to "test drive" to fully see its capabilities.
Either way...

I'm pretty rusty when it comes to BSD/Linux
Right now I'm stuck on importing the disk/partitions from the original windows install:

da0 - 120GB - RAID5 - NTFS : Windows root drive
da1 - 160GB - RAID1 - NTFS : WebSite
da2 - 1TB - RAID1 - NTFS : Media
da3 - 4TB - RAID0 - NTFS : Media
da4 - 4TB - RAID0 - NTFS : Media
da5 - 1TB - RAID1 - NTFS : Media
da6 - 500GB - RAID0 - NTFS : Software Rep.

RAID1 are single disk arrays
RAID0 are 2 disk array

My main concern is performance as this box will have to handle streaming content to 2 or more blades which in turn will handle streaming the media to 8 - 10 HD clients. Server in question is my DL580 in my signature...

 

[dlavigne]

Which version of FreeNAS? If 9.3, you need to create a ZFS pool and dataset first, then follow the instructions in http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_storage.html#import-disk.

 

[_Adrian_]

Thanks for the quick reply !

Yes, it is 9.3
However all these drives have data on them and no back up of them ( yet )...
I would like to just mount these partitions and do a quick test and see how would FreeNAS handle iSCSI over FC to multiple targets that in turn will be streaming HD to 4 or 6 simultaneous devices.

If it passes this test I will move forward and do a more permanent install.

 

[SweetAndLow]

You can't do that and even if you could the performance would be terrible. You need to create a pool using zfs to have everything working properly. And when using zfs you don't use normal raid.

read this: https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/


lol third time i have posted that link in the last 10 min. It has just been living in my paste buffer.

 

[_Adrian_]

Problem is that all the drives are being used and some are even filled to the gills...
Reading through it all seems like iSCSI isnt very much liked by FreeNAS :/

 

[SweetAndLow]

people use iscsi it just has certain requirements that are more hardware intense than others and when people don't build system like that iscsi and freenas don't perform very well. Usually to get good results you need 32+ GB of memory and you can't fill your pool past 50% full.

 

[_Adrian_]

So in other words you cant over subscribe it...
That means I need to double my storage and add a few SSD's for caching/buffering purposes...

 

[SweetAndLow]

There are people who know more about iscsi than me but maxing out memory is probably better than dealing with ssd's.

 

[_Adrian_]

To my luck DDR2 ECC ( PC2-5300F ) is fairly cheap $100 per 64GB ) :-D