Nevermind the rest, I just answered all my questions by reading rather than jumping to ask questions, go figure.
I'm new to freenas but I think it's going to fit the niche in my setup I've been wanting for quite a while. I'm not a newbie with the technology and do the network side of things for work but the SAN side I've done is more on the large datacenter side of things and mostly on the networking side so here's where I'm starting at:
1. Good network topology already setup and well understood all running gig with Cisco switches.
2. Decent tray style 8 bay case to stick freenas in.
3. Tape library with everything backed up already. Right around 4tb of existing data on the tapes. It's also sitting live on a former WHS box which turned into a 2008R2 box as well as a few other places data is stored in my network.
4. 8 good 2tb drives. I've looked at the SMART data and none look to be having any issues. All have run in my computer room which is kept at 70deg so not much in the way of heating issues.
5. Large UPS to keep it all working when the power flickers.
6. Temporary freenas running 9.2.1 to mess with while I decide on how to proceed.
I've already looked at the threads on ECC and motherboards so I'm just going to ditch the one I was thinking of using and going with a new motherboard/memory that supports ECC. My data falls into a few categories:
1. ISO images
2. VMWare (or maybe in the future VirtualBox) storage
3. Professional documents and information
4. Video files
5. Backups for systems that I can't use the backup agent on
So my questions are:
1. Do I spend the cash on a decent RAID controller that has 8 SATA ports on it or just a normal SATA expansion card or get a mobo with enough SATA ports.
2. With 16tb of potential space and several raid options is just slamming all 8 drives into a single volume a good idea or try to decide how to parcel it all out into smaller units. I'm pretty certain I can live with a 50% actual use of the drive space and have looked at Raid60 for this setup (but I'm new to the terminology of freenas so...).
3. I plan on having iScsi, NFS, CIFS running (and anything else I can find a use for) but that's the starting point that I need to fulfill.
Mike
I'm new to freenas but I think it's going to fit the niche in my setup I've been wanting for quite a while. I'm not a newbie with the technology and do the network side of things for work but the SAN side I've done is more on the large datacenter side of things and mostly on the networking side so here's where I'm starting at:
1. Good network topology already setup and well understood all running gig with Cisco switches.
2. Decent tray style 8 bay case to stick freenas in.
3. Tape library with everything backed up already. Right around 4tb of existing data on the tapes. It's also sitting live on a former WHS box which turned into a 2008R2 box as well as a few other places data is stored in my network.
4. 8 good 2tb drives. I've looked at the SMART data and none look to be having any issues. All have run in my computer room which is kept at 70deg so not much in the way of heating issues.
5. Large UPS to keep it all working when the power flickers.
6. Temporary freenas running 9.2.1 to mess with while I decide on how to proceed.
I've already looked at the threads on ECC and motherboards so I'm just going to ditch the one I was thinking of using and going with a new motherboard/memory that supports ECC. My data falls into a few categories:
1. ISO images
2. VMWare (or maybe in the future VirtualBox) storage
3. Professional documents and information
4. Video files
5. Backups for systems that I can't use the backup agent on
So my questions are:
1. Do I spend the cash on a decent RAID controller that has 8 SATA ports on it or just a normal SATA expansion card or get a mobo with enough SATA ports.
2. With 16tb of potential space and several raid options is just slamming all 8 drives into a single volume a good idea or try to decide how to parcel it all out into smaller units. I'm pretty certain I can live with a 50% actual use of the drive space and have looked at Raid60 for this setup (but I'm new to the terminology of freenas so...).
3. I plan on having iScsi, NFS, CIFS running (and anything else I can find a use for) but that's the starting point that I need to fulfill.
Mike
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