Adrian
Contributor
- Joined
- Jun 29, 2011
- Messages
- 166
Exactly my point 8GB RAM is twice what those servers come with. Not exactly re-using existing hardware either, you had to buy that as a storage server. The original poster wanted to reuse a PC. He's basically in the wrong place if he wants to build a server out of a spare PC. I do it all the time using ClearOS. RAID card and XFS seems pretty solid. Had some drives break but no data loss.
It was a spare machine. Originally I had been using it as a firewall (hence the second NIC), then as an ESXi server (hence the additional 4 GB of memory), and finally as a NAS when I decided to ditch my old clunker of a FreeBSD workstation (with ZFS and acting as NFS and SMB NAS) and use a NAS and a small box as the workstation, Well written appliances are good. I no longer knit my own (FreeBSD) firewalls either. pfSense is so much easier
I was wrong about the disks. Those I did buy were 4 * 2 TB Reds and 2 spares.
You would definitely need to mirror those hard drives. The Green WD ones last about 6 months and then stop working. The Blue ones seem OK though.
The problem with WD Greens is that they park the heads after 7 seconds of inactivity, Possibly OK in a consumer Windows PC, fine an USB enclosure occasionally plugged in for for backup or transfer, but bad on a machine which accesses disks quite frequently, causing up to 100 load cycles an hour. The WD limit on load cycles was 300,000.
I had WD Greens in the old clunker as a RAIDZ1, and circumvented the load cycle problem with a script which forced the disks to be accessed every 4 seconds. Others found that wdidle3(?) could be used to extend the idle time. As far as I can remember the old clunker was new in 2009 (originally a built to order state of the art games machine which the supplier was selling at a discount as the original customer no longer wanted it) and I retired it in late 2015 still with the original WD Greens. Machine turned on almost continuously for all those years.
In any case, WD Greens, and many other consumer drives, are not that suitable for use in a NAS as they have a very long time out on error recovery, which can cause the disk to be dropped out of the RAID. This can sometimes be turned off. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control and many other places.
Very wise to encrypt your data before giving it to Amazon. I'd be concerned about who's software was doing the encryption too.
Personally, I would be very chary of storing any of my data unencrypted on somebody else's machine / cloud. I wonder if the TrueNAS S3 Backup option can encrypt, and if FreeNAS 10 S3 Peering is the same / similar. I don't have a FreeNAS 10 machine to play with. I did try it on a Microserver, but it was so dreadfully slow (the Turion is quite a sloth - http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Turion+II+Neo+N40L+Dual-Core ). I am not paranoid enough to want to inspect the source of what I use at home (it is available), though at $JOB I insisted that we built FreeBSD and packages from source, to ensure that we had it all, to facilitate patching and allow code inspection.