NTFS Volume Crashes FreeNAS when Writing to it

[aplats]

Hello,

I have my FreeNAS box chugging along nicely. It's on UPS, ECC ram all the recommended stuff. Now I need to get a backup working. I have two 4TB ZFS drives mirrored. I bought a third 4TB drive, put it in an eSATA enclosure and formatted it NTFS, so it would be readable elsewhere.

I've tried mounting via the GUI as well as the ntfs-3g command. I can get it mounted, but once I try to run an rsync task or a cp to it, after a few seconds, FreeNAS completely locks up and either hangs or reboots...

I am able to see files I copied on the drive fine, just can't delete from it or write. When I tried deleting from it, the files come back after reboot. I've tried detaching manually to see the files actually get deleted, but they don't.

Anyone have any ideas, or is this truly a bug? If it is, I'll need to figure some other method out in the meantime. I know I can have one of my windows machines robocopy every week from the NAS, but I really wanted the NAS to be a self-sustaining system that doesn't rely on my other machines.

I might look into using ext2 and getting a driver for windows, but would prefer not to do this.

I searched and didn't find anyone else with this problem, so I hope I didn't miss anything.

I am currently running FreeNAS 9.2 release. I upgraded from 9.1 release via the GUI.

 

[cyberjock]

Well, you've got the situation all wrong. Here's some cool info you'll want to know.

1. NTFS support in FreeBSD is crap. It's known to be unreliable. It's known to crash FreeBSD/FreeNAS. It's known to eat all the data on your NTFS partition without warning. It's meant as a short term measure, and its meant for use as read-only for desperate individuals only. It was never meant to be a long term solution and should never be used as a writable solution.
2. eSATA has it's own weird quirks. For that reason, it's not recommended. (But this probably isn't your problem).
3. Using ext2 isn't going to buy you a damn thing. FreeBSD doesn't use ext at all. Neither does Windows(without the driver you mentioned). The only 2 file systems to chose from for FreeBSD is UFS and ZFS. Neither have any support in Windows, at all.
4. If you want to be able to use the disk "elsewhere" your only good option is ZFS since you could use it in Linux as well as FreeBSD. Probably not the option you want to hear, but that's the sad truth.

So your options are quite limited. The real thing to think about here is going either full FreeNAS or going back to full Windows. Even if FreeNAS poops all over itself, any zpool is easily restorable by making a new FreeNAS boot disk and using the auto-import feature.

Feel free to call up Microsoft and tell them what jerks they are for locking you into their proprietary file systems.

 

[aplats]

Well, you've got the situation all wrong. Here's some cool info you'll want to know.

1. NTFS support in FreeBSD is crap. It's known to be unreliable. It's known to crash FreeBSD/FreeNAS. It's known to eat all the data on your NTFS partition without warning. It's meant as a short term measure, and its meant for use as read-only for desperate individuals only. It was never meant to be a long term solution and should never be used as a writable solution.
2. eSATA has it's own weird quirks. For that reason, it's not recommended. (But this probably isn't your problem).
3. Using ext2 isn't going to buy you a damn thing. FreeBSD doesn't use ext at all. Neither does Windows(without the driver you mentioned). The only 2 file systems to chose from for FreeBSD is UFS and ZFS. Neither have any support in Windows, at all.
4. If you want to be able to use the disk "elsewhere" your only good option is ZFS since you could use it in Linux as well as FreeBSD. Probably not the option you want to hear, but that's the sad truth.

So your options are quite limited. The real thing to think about here is going either full FreeNAS or going back to full Windows. Even if FreeNAS poops all over itself, any zpool is easily restorable by making a new FreeNAS boot disk and using the auto-import feature.

Feel free to call up Microsoft and tell them what jerk-offs they are for locking you into their proprietary file systems.

Thanks for the detailed response! Yeah, I was afraid of that. Not a huge deal--I could also try creating a linux jail that rsyncs the data to the NTFS drive from FreeNAS.

So going all FreeNAS. I have the mirrored drives for fault tolerance, snapshots for "backups" and that should be pretty good. What are the chances of ZFS puking and the volume going poo poo? I know that's the whole reason we use ZFS, for its wonderful resilience, but have you heard of that happening?

I'm the kind of person that likes to have 3 or 4 copies of things, and a drive I can even keep offsite.

As for calling up Microsoft... I'm still on hold. Estimate time is 4 hours, but it will be well worth letting those slackjaws know they need to take care of this.

Maybe I approached this wrong trying to do NTFS with FreeBSD. I should have tried making the eSATA drive ReFS instead...

 

[cyberjock]

Thanks for the detailed response! Yeah, I was afraid of that. Not a huge deal--I could also try creating a linux jail that rsyncs the data to the NTFS drive from FreeNAS.

No, you can't do this. The file systems are managed by FreeBSD. It's like I told you.. your ONLY good option is #4.

So going all FreeNAS. I have the mirrored drives for fault tolerance, snapshots for "backups" and that should be pretty good. What are the chances of ZFS puking and the volume going poo poo? I know that's the whole reason we use ZFS, for its wonderful resilience, but have you heard of that happening?

That's hard to say. But I will say this: RAID is NOT a backup. PERIOD. So you should not consider yourself to have a backup of any kind unless you have a separate storage location with your data.

As for calling up Microsoft... I'm still on hold. Estimate time is 4 hours, but it will be well worth letting those slackjaws know they need to take care of this.

LOL

Maybe I approached this wrong trying to do NTFS with FreeBSD. I should have tried making the eSATA drive ReFS instead...

Sorry, but I have to laugh. ReFS is crap IMO. I don't know what you've read on it, but I have 2 friends with sizable ReFS servers and it is doing very very poorly in the performance arena. They're actually looking at going back to NTFS because the performance penalty is so high its making their server unable to do its designed function.

 

[aplats]

No, you can't do this. The file systems are managed by FreeBSD. It's like I told you.. your ONLY good option is #4.



That's hard to say. But I will say this: RAID is NOT a backup. PERIOD. So you should not consider yourself to have a backup of any kind unless you have a separate storage location with your data.



LOL



Sorry, but I have to laugh. ReFS is crap IMO. I don't know what you've read on it, but I have 2 friends with sizable ReFS servers and it is doing very very poorly in the performance arena. They're actually looking at going back to NTFS because the performance penalty is so high its making their server unable to do its designed function.

Haha. Yeah, I was joking about ReFS. I actually haven't messed with it much, but it's good to hear some input on it.

I was off on the linux jail, since like you said, you can't present the drive directly to the jail, but it has to go through FreeNAS first. So I'll format the external drive as ZFS and set up a rsync job.

I appreciate the help and advise!

 

[cyberjock]

Yep! Good luck!

 

[aplats]

By the way, do you know if the Linux ZFS module would have any problems if I encrypt the ZFS volume? I'm finding various things on google about that.

 

[cyberjock]

The Encryption used in FreeNAS is basically ZFS inside a geli container device. If linux supports geli and if you can figure out the CLI stuff you should be able to get it to work. But I'd verify that you can do it before you try it.

If you aren't that advanced of a user, then the answer is "no".

 

[aplats]

I'll take a look at it. I should be able to handle it, it's just a matter if the hassle will be worth it. Slackware was my first linux distro (back in the day when I was 14), so I don't mind a challenge...

Thanks again for the info.

 

[aplats]

P.S. I could always just run PC-BSD or FreeBSD instead of linux. Unless something has changed in the last year, it's not looking good for GELI on linux. GELI is for FreeBSD and LUKS is for Linux.