Lim
Cadet
- Joined
- Mar 26, 2015
- Messages
- 5
Hello Forum,
first of all *** T H A N K S *** to everyone who contributed to FreeNAS! Fabulous.
Yes, I’m still just another FreeNAS noob, a home user without prior FreeBSD experience (sigh!), but happily using FreeNAS for more than a year now. It just works fine. It took me some time to read up on FreeNAS, of course, but it was worth it.
Why did I go for FreeNAS?
Two events roughly coincided: I detected data corruption on my low budget, not even old home NAS, and I read a computer magazine article about self-built home server solutions including a recommendation to use FreeNAS (c’t 2/2014, http://www.heise.de/ct/14/02/links/116.shtml, German).
For what purpose?
Up to now I want nothing more than a reliable (!) file server for my wife’s professional use and for family document sharing, at moderate acquisition and operating costs. I know it won’t release me from the duty to backup the data to protect it from misuse, malware, theft, or disaster. So far it is only accessed from my home LAN by Windows users.
Of course I tried to get an impression of whether FreeNAS would be the right thing for me. All the experienced forum members here appear pleasantly moderate about it... but, hey, if FreeNAS is well configured and running on decent hardware, is there any other affordable and at least equally reliable and trustworthy home NAS solution?
What hardware did I choose?
I initially followed the guidelines from the computer magazine and, after reading http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/, which was of great help, I added another 2 hard disks, 8GB of RAM and a UPS(huge thanks to Cyberjock for his must-read guide!). So I ended up with
1x ASUS P9D-X iC222
1x Intel Core i3-4130T
2x Kingston ValueRAM DIMM 8 GB ECC DDR3-1600
4x Western Digital 3TB WD30EFRX Red
1x Fractal Design Arc Midi R2 ATX
1x be quiet! System Power 7 300W ATX
1x USB 32GB Kingston DataTraveler Micro
1x UPS AEG Home Protect 600
How did I prepare?
I changed some BIOS settings as advised by the magazine though FreeNAS may not support some power saving settings (I hope this is not counter-productive):
Advanced -> CPU Configuration -> Package C State demotion : Enabled
Advanced -> CPU Configuration -> Package C State limit : C6
Advanced -> PCI Subsystem Settings -> PCI Express Settings -> ASPM Support : Auto
Monitor -> FAN Speed Control : Low Speed Mode
Advanced -> APM -> Power On By PCIE : Enabled
Advanced -> APM -> Restore AC Power Loss : Power On
After assembling the machine I used Ultimate Boot CD on a USB stick to test the RAM with Memtest86+ and each hard disk with the extended test from Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for DOS (Western Digital), and I increased the hard disk’s park delay time from 5s to 300s by “wdidle3 /s 300” to limit their load cycles (as suggested in the German forum; and I found http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hacking-wd-greens-and-reds-with-wdidle3-exe.18171/ with more background). The two newer drives already had the value set to 300. Anything I forgot to do?
How did I setup FreeNAS?
All in all, setup was less complex than expected, having the GUI and the User guide next to each other on the screen. Beforehand again Cyberjock’s presentation and the “FreeNAS 9.1 Setup Guide” post by fishinfiend gave a helpful overview.
I decided against encryption because I fear the extra complications if something goes wrong. It’s more a vague feeling. It appears to me that for a home user the only benefit of encryption is that in the hopefully unlikely event of a theft no one could access the data.
I set up a single RaidZ2 VDev and I do regular scrubs. The only services I run so far are CIFS (with Unix style ACLs) and SMART. I did not yet succeed in setting up my UPS properly, but that may be a topic of another post.
Meanwhile I did several updates without notable problems. I hope I can rely on FreeNAS for the next couple of years.
Thanks again to all developers and contributors.
first of all *** T H A N K S *** to everyone who contributed to FreeNAS! Fabulous.
Yes, I’m still just another FreeNAS noob, a home user without prior FreeBSD experience (sigh!), but happily using FreeNAS for more than a year now. It just works fine. It took me some time to read up on FreeNAS, of course, but it was worth it.
Why did I go for FreeNAS?
Two events roughly coincided: I detected data corruption on my low budget, not even old home NAS, and I read a computer magazine article about self-built home server solutions including a recommendation to use FreeNAS (c’t 2/2014, http://www.heise.de/ct/14/02/links/116.shtml, German).
For what purpose?
Up to now I want nothing more than a reliable (!) file server for my wife’s professional use and for family document sharing, at moderate acquisition and operating costs. I know it won’t release me from the duty to backup the data to protect it from misuse, malware, theft, or disaster. So far it is only accessed from my home LAN by Windows users.
Of course I tried to get an impression of whether FreeNAS would be the right thing for me. All the experienced forum members here appear pleasantly moderate about it... but, hey, if FreeNAS is well configured and running on decent hardware, is there any other affordable and at least equally reliable and trustworthy home NAS solution?
What hardware did I choose?
I initially followed the guidelines from the computer magazine and, after reading http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/, which was of great help, I added another 2 hard disks, 8GB of RAM and a UPS(huge thanks to Cyberjock for his must-read guide!). So I ended up with
1x ASUS P9D-X iC222
1x Intel Core i3-4130T
2x Kingston ValueRAM DIMM 8 GB ECC DDR3-1600
4x Western Digital 3TB WD30EFRX Red
1x Fractal Design Arc Midi R2 ATX
1x be quiet! System Power 7 300W ATX
1x USB 32GB Kingston DataTraveler Micro
1x UPS AEG Home Protect 600
How did I prepare?
I changed some BIOS settings as advised by the magazine though FreeNAS may not support some power saving settings (I hope this is not counter-productive):
Advanced -> CPU Configuration -> Package C State demotion : Enabled
Advanced -> CPU Configuration -> Package C State limit : C6
Advanced -> PCI Subsystem Settings -> PCI Express Settings -> ASPM Support : Auto
Monitor -> FAN Speed Control : Low Speed Mode
Advanced -> APM -> Power On By PCIE : Enabled
Advanced -> APM -> Restore AC Power Loss : Power On
After assembling the machine I used Ultimate Boot CD on a USB stick to test the RAM with Memtest86+ and each hard disk with the extended test from Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for DOS (Western Digital), and I increased the hard disk’s park delay time from 5s to 300s by “wdidle3 /s 300” to limit their load cycles (as suggested in the German forum; and I found http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hacking-wd-greens-and-reds-with-wdidle3-exe.18171/ with more background). The two newer drives already had the value set to 300. Anything I forgot to do?
How did I setup FreeNAS?
All in all, setup was less complex than expected, having the GUI and the User guide next to each other on the screen. Beforehand again Cyberjock’s presentation and the “FreeNAS 9.1 Setup Guide” post by fishinfiend gave a helpful overview.
I decided against encryption because I fear the extra complications if something goes wrong. It’s more a vague feeling. It appears to me that for a home user the only benefit of encryption is that in the hopefully unlikely event of a theft no one could access the data.
I set up a single RaidZ2 VDev and I do regular scrubs. The only services I run so far are CIFS (with Unix style ACLs) and SMART. I did not yet succeed in setting up my UPS properly, but that may be a topic of another post.
Meanwhile I did several updates without notable problems. I hope I can rely on FreeNAS for the next couple of years.
Thanks again to all developers and contributors.
