My First FreeNAS

[Ty Eichele]

Hello - a few months ago when I came across the whole NAS concept, I knew I had to have one. I started researching, and slowly putting parts together. I ended up with the following hardware:

Thermaltake V1 Case (Modified to Accomodate 3 Hard Disks)
ASRock Rack E3c224d2i Motherboard
Intel Celeron G1820
16gb ECC Kingston Memory
2tb Seagate Barracuda LP Hard Drives x 3
Corsair CS450M PSU
Sandisk 16gb Flash Drive

So far, I love it. I'm still learning how to use everything, and take advantage of all the features that FreeNAS has to offer. My primary use for this NAS is pictures/files on my home network. I don't plan on running any jails, etc on it. Just storage for pictures, files, etc.


I want to make sure that I have everything set up properly in case of failure. As you can see above, I'm running a RaidZ1 configuration with only 3 hard drives. I've read a lot of good and bad with this setup....can anyone chime in?


As far as maintenance goes, my Scrub schedule is: Min=00 Hour=00 Day of Month=Everyday Month=Every Month Day of Week=Sunday Enabled=True

Periodic Snapshot = Every Day between 0900-1800 once a day

SMART Tests - Long Test @ Hour=05 Day of Month=01, 15 Every Month Everyday of Week
Short Test @ Hour=00 Everyday of Month Every Month on Saturday


My final question, is there anything else I should be doing as far as backups, maintenance, etc. to provide the best possible outcome if something were to fail and I needed to restore? Do I need to backup my boot usb somehow?
I will keep reading the manual and these forums, I learn a lot every time I get the chance to read.
Thanks!

 

[nightshade00013]

Welcome to the forum.

Your setup looks like it will do pretty well for the most part with what you are planning to do.

A lot of people are staying away from Kingston ram do to some fancy number scheme issue where different versions have the same model number but if you bought them as a pair and they are working I don't see any issues right offhand.

The drives you have are consumer desktop drives so you will want to make sure that your not idling them as FreeNAS will write to the array at different intervals and the parking process is what causes issues with a lot of the drives. I am still building out things as I am on a tight budget but have a pair of laptop drives and it works fine just though with the HDD standby set to "Always On" The reason why raidZ1 is not recommended is because when one drive fails and you replace it and then begin the process of resilvering the other two drives are stressed which can cause another failure with the drive capacities getting larger and larger the resilver time is increased so the stress time is increased and the window for potential failure is also increased. Should that happen kiss your data goodbye. So make sure you have backups of everything that is there.

Hopefully you did your proper testing on the system before putting it into use. Run Memtest on the Ram and Badblocks on the drives

On a side note I had a windoze box that I had as my storage box for quite a while, the drive that failed on me was the newest one I had which was a 2000GB Seagate Barracuda. No raid, no backups but luckily was just movies so that data could be easily replaced. When my new system is done I plan to use raidZ3 though.

 

[Jailer]

Check your smart testing and scrub schedules, you seem to be running them more often than needed. Cyberjock has a good guide on both.

 

[TheDubiousDubber]

Some people choose to run two USB boot drives in a raid 1 for redundancy. Overkill as far as I'm concerned, but to each their own. I think they are very easy to replace if the drive is corrupted or something goes wrong. All I would suggest is to backup your config. If the drive ever fails you can just install the base FreeNAS software and reload from the saved config.

 

[Ty Eichele]

Thanks for all the replies. I did run Memtest86 on the ram, approx 3 passes with 0 errors. I did not know about Badblocks though. I'm using these Seagate drives because I already owned them, and like a lot of people, am on a tight budget when it comes to this, so just using what I already had. I did set the 'HD Standby' to 'Always On' as recommended. I also saved the Config file under 'System -> General' to my laptop computer, and will continue to do that whenever I make changes in the GUI. And I followed Cyberjock's guidelines to set up the SMART and scrub tests.

Maybe I'll have to upgrade the hard drives sooner or later and go to 4 drives total, for better redundancy. I have an external hard drive that I'll use for now to keep everything backed up also.


I ran across a SMART option in the motherboards BIOS settings, it is currently disabled by default. Should I enable this???

Thanks again for the input so far. I appreciate the help!

 

[solarisguy]

Some people choose to run two USB boot drives in a raid 1 for redundancy. Overkill as far as I'm concerned, but to each their own. I think they are very easy to replace if the drive is corrupted or something goes wrong. All I would suggest is to backup your config. If the drive ever fails you can just install the base FreeNAS software and reload from the saved config.

I am afraid that you are misguided...

Some people, and rightly so, are afraid that their FreeNAS server would stop working when needed. Thus if RAID 1 is a better (and only marginally more expensive or more complex) solution, its deployment for boot drives (USB memory devices) is beneficial.

 

[DrKK]

Check your smart testing and scrub schedules, you seem to be running them more often than needed.

That's not how I read it. Looks like he had semi-monthly longs, and weekly shorts. That sounds fine. I am sure cyberjock would sign off on that as a very reasonable schedule.

 

[TheDubiousDubber]

I am afraid that you are misguided...

Some people, and rightly so, are afraid that their FreeNAS server would stop working when needed. Thus if RAID 1 is a better (and only marginally more expensive or more complex) solution, its deployment for boot drives (USB memory devices) is beneficial.

Perhaps I should have clarified. For most people when it comes to a home server, for the purpose of sharing files, I believe it is overkill. Most people aren't worried about a little down time when it comes to sharing files over their home network.

In the case of the OP I would think adding another drive and setting up a RAIDZ2 over a RAIDZ1 would be the most beneficial addition to the current setup.