Old hardware for FreeNAS box for Production Data Share

[Bizquick]

At my office we have a lot of old hardware servers that seam still usable for some things.
But just are not worth investing in any upgrades into.
We have been in need of some NAS storage for backups for sometime. And don't get me wrong I like some of the easy features for the commercial products like Synology and Qnap.
But for the past 2 months I have been playing with FreeNAS at home for a Plex server.
I gota say I love it. I have no Idea why I haven done this sooner at home.
I'm using a old desktop that we were going to scrap its a little under powered and only have 8 gigs of ram on it.
But I dont do anything more than file share and Plex and I feel like it works ok. sometimes have some issues with video files that are large and 1080p stream. So I just down the stream to 720p and lower the meg setting to a good fit. That seams to fix most issues.But Back to my questions.

Our older hardware at the office is some Dell R310's with single Xeon X3040's 2.4ghz 4 core's 16 gigs of ram so I might be able to push to 20 to 24gigs. And I have lots of SATA drives WD NAS Red's 2TB 7200's.
Most of the servers have raid cards some are a Perc 6i and some are some Dell S100 or S300 and there is one LSI SAS 1068e chipset based card.
Anyway if I was to set one of these for a NAS file share for production backups or maybe SMB image shares. Using FreeNAS Would it be a okay fit?
And if so what would be better Iscsi connections or just SMB sharing?
Also should I use the raid in FreeNAS?
Or with this older hardware processor should I just use the raid 5 on the raid cards?
The Perc 6i is harder to make the drives look like JOB so I can swap the card if I should use the FreeNAS raid.
But mostly just trying to see if using this hardware for this function is a good fit or not.

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

1. Never use hardware RAID with ZFS/FreeNAS. Ever. Bad. Very bad.

2. If you're just using FreeNAS for file services (not Plex, not jails, not VMs), pretty much any supported hardware can saturate a 1GB link. The Intel Xeon X3430 was launched in 2009 so it is going to be power hungry and slow compared to what you'd get now but, like I said, if 1GB is your target, it should be fine for file services.

3. Assuming you use an actual HBA (+/- $100) and not RAID, it sounds as though you have everything you need for a reliable FreeNAS server. It won't be the fastest box on the block but should be perfectly adequate for bulk storage of backup data.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[Bizquick]

Well the reason I said use the raid card raid. Was I just didn't want make the processor do any extra work. And I dont plan to do any VM's or jails.
It had dual NIC. I would want to LACP link it and get a little bit of aggregated bandwidth. But I would still be limited on speed of the Array. And with Sata drives it not going to be much. I'll try to swap out the card that does JOB better and try what you recommend. I have never used freenas for the raid setup before so this will be interesting.
on my home setup. I just have 1 drive in a raid 0. Its just doing plex and my video files. If it dies. I'm not worried. But after reading about the spec's it seams that freenas needs to be quite on a much beefy box than I would have expected. But maybe its cause of all the options that can be done.

 

[gpsguy]

We understand, but as @MatthewSteinhoff has already said, DON'T use it.

FreeNAS wants direct access to your disks. You can (and should) set up scheduled SMART tests for your hard disks. Should a problem develop, you should receive an email warning about it. If you use hardware RAID, FreeNAS can't see the underlying disks. We've had a number of users end up in a world of hurt, up to and including data loss, due to using hardware RAID.

Well the reason I said use the raid card raid. Was I just didn't want make the processor do any extra work.

 

[Stux]

BUT, certainly use the hardware in production, just add a suitable HBA first, or limit yourself to motherboard SATA connectors.

If you think about it... the Hardware RAID card probably doesn't have 16GB of ECC ram and a dual xeon powering it. FreeNAS's ZFS system does a much better job than any hardware raid card, but it needs direct access to the HDs, just like the hardware raid card has.

 

[wblock]

Well the reason I said use the raid card raid. Was I just didn't want make the processor do any extra work.

The RAID card has a processor also... ZFS makes your computer into a powerful RAID controller. The main processor has more memory, more power, and better cooling. Adding an RAID card generates more heat, uses more power, and vastly reduces how well ZFS can work.

 

[MatthewSteinhoff]

it seams that freenas needs to be quite on a much beefy box

Not really, @Bizquick. Our FreeNAS replication target is an a HP DL360 G5. Its Xeon E5430 processor was announced in 2007 and EOLed in 2010. It's two years older than your X3430. This was the primary not too long ago. It can hit 45% utilization on the 10GbE NIC without any tuning. (Our faster, primary host can do almost 70%. Again, with no tuning and in a stock configuration.)

The key is reliable hardware and a supported (ECC, HBA) configuration.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[Bizquick]

Okay sounds good. I didn't configure the disc's in the raid card. For me to take the card out. I would have to do something tricky to the back plane to convert it to the motherboard SATA Ports.
I really didn't want to customize it much. But if I need to I could do it.
It has 2 internal USB ports I going to use a 16gb flash drive for the OS and set that for the boot.
I did set up the raid in FreeNAS it looks cool.
Drives are not the best but all of this is older hardware collecting dust.
2TB WD Reds.
(I dont like WD's much. if any fail I will be replacing with HSGT if this unit does okay for us.)
But sounds like this unit should be fine for what we need for the backups.
and Looks like I can play with some other features too.
I need about 5 TB of storage for the backups. so any suggestions on the raid setup?

 

[Huib]

For backups speed is not a major issue so raidz 2 or 3 (depending on how many drives you have). If you can over provision your storage so you don't fill it up to its limits but Max 80% because a full pool will degrade performance

 

[Bizquick]

Well turns out I get to play with this junk at home. They didnt want to reuse the old hardware cause they have already wrote it off for tax purposes. so I'm taking this junk home. I think it will be a small improvement of my single 1 drive FreeNAS box. on a 8gig ram desktop.
processor in the dell is a little older but 20 gigs of ram and the extra space should make up for it.
I think I'm going to swap out the DVD drive for a SSD though and use it for jails. (PLEX jail its only 240G but that should be fine).
Okay I'm going to make a new post if I need help thanks for all the input its helped a lot.