Sanity Check on my Build

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Scott K

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Apr 13, 2017
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Hi!

I have finally decided to bring sanity to my pile of stuff that's been accumulating since the age of WindowsME. Sifting through hard drives and finding videos of the dancing baby from Ally McBeal.

I have a Dell R900 antique server with 4 8gb memory sticks in it, 4 Xeon 7455 (6 cores, 2.13 ghz, 60watts) processors. It's not too noisy down in the basement 'man cave'. I put a couple matching 16gb flash drives in the front two USB and it looks like FreeNAS9.10 installed on both at the same time?

I pulled out the raid card that was in there (Perc6?) because apparently it's no good and put in a Fujitsu card that I changed the firmware on as recommended on the web. It shows up as Avago SAS 9211-8i and I can enter the bios when I start the Dell. That seems to be acceptable according to some things I read.

I have an old Netgear 52port switch that's been connecting all the stuff in the house. I setup 4 ports on that to act like a single link and I setup the 4 network ports on the Dell to act like a single link, too. That seems to be working. I see messages when FreeNAS starts indicating something like 'lagg0 up', and eth0 to eth3 link going from down to up.

There are a pair of 450gb SAS 15k drives in the front of it, but I think I need to reformat those or something for FreeNAS to recognize them. Or maybe because they are connected to the internal controller of the Dell. I thought I could use those as an interim 'holding tank' for stuff that I want to file on the RAID array properly. That's a project for later, I think. They only fit in the Dell. They have different connectors than all my other drives.

I got an old UPS, blew the dust off, and put a new battery in it and it seems to work fine. I guess I need to figure how to signal the FreeNAS to shutdown with grace. It's an APC BackUPS Pro 500. I'm handy enough to maybe add a second or third battery in parallel if that helps.

I have an empty case that can hold 12 drives. I put what I think is a decent old power supply in it Antec530 TruePower. I have the front switch to power on and off the the PSU.

Then there's a card that multiplies the number of drives I can connect. It shows up as 'HP SAS EXP Card 2.08' in the FreeNAS shell command line. I connected this to the server with a heavy duty cord. I think I read I can use another cord to speed up data rate between the server and the empty box but I'd need to rig something up. I moved a single drive around to different ports on the HP card and tried different cable plugs and it seems to recognize them. I see the drive moving around when I look in the bios for the raid card on the server before it boots. So. I think that's working.

I read something about needing to update the firmware on that HP card or it won't perform properly?

I got 8 3tb drives collected that I want to put in and have 2 act as parity. Or however ZFS does it's redundancy. Something like a RAID 6 equivalent. Give me 18tb of useable space and hopefully last until I'm retired. 99% read large files. No tons of little random writes like a database would do. Little files would be personal photos and tax files and things like that. Again, mostly read.

I got scared reading how ZFS can make you lose all your data so I took some other stuff and put together a second machine to act as a kind of backup. It is a 6-core AMD processor with 16gb of error correction memory and I put 'OpenMediaVault' on it. It has all my spare drives pulled out of USB enclosures (couple 1tbs, 2tbs, a 5tb ..., etc.). It has 3 ethernet ports but only using the motherboard one, right now. I figure I could keep copies of my most important stuff on there and if something is going bad with one of the drives, it will warn me.


I would like to move my PlexMediaServer to the FreeNAS system on the DellServer. I'm not that up on what's important for Plex Server. There's a lot of cores and a fair amount of memory. I hope that the FreeNAS and the Plex can share the box and the performance of each will be ok. Right now, I have the Plex on the machine I use to turn my BluRays into files, surf web, email, mess around with the network and such. I'd like it to sit with the files. Just there's no high end video on the Dell R900. Don't think I need it.

I'm kind of into this setup as I don't have money to get more new stuff. Maybe a drive or that second cable. So, I'm asking if the whole setup is crazy and I should give up. Or, if it'll be serviceable, if there are some tweaks or minor adjustments I could make to have it be a real winner for what I'm trying to do. I got other junk laying around (2.5 inch hard drives, IDE hard drives, more network cards, RAID controllers from various eras, couple more PC cases, and such.)

If anybody has input, awesome. Otherwise, at least I typed this all out for myself to set it straight in my head.
 
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