Hello folks. I am currently in possession of a 64TB FreeNAS server that I’ve been using for some years. Unfortunately, it’s at 90% capacity which means it can trigger world war 3, so I’m looking to upgrade or build a new one, most likely one with a 128TB total capacity.
I’m currently running a SUPERMICRO X9SRA (LGA 2011) paired with a Xeon E5-2670 (8 cores 16 threads) and 64GB of Samsung 1333 MHz DDR3 ECC RAM.
The question I have for you guys is, should I just upgrade the memory to 128GB and keep the same motehrboard/CPU, or should I scrap the whole thing and move on to a more modern platform. Which motherboard/CPU do you guys recommend if I’m to go with the latter option? Don’t forget, ECC RAM is a requirement.
What is your price range?
I just upgraded to a Supermicro X10 Board, pretty happy with it.
You can easily get them used for a good deal with a Xeon V4 CPU.
It’ll gain you the IPC jump from Sandy Bridge to Broadwell, DDR4 RAM, HTML5 KVM…
If you want to go much newer, a Ryzen CPU and Asrock Rack Board might be a good option. This Option is much more expensive though due to Motherboard and UDIMM ECC RAM Requirements.
Is it just capacity that’s a problem? You might already know this, but the 1GB per terabyte of storage thing isn’t a hard and fast rule. The more memory you have the more the OS will use as cache, but it’s not required.
So, with that in mind unless you’ve got a bunch of users, or you’re running a media server from it with a bunch of transcoding or something, then you’d probably be just fine swapping in some bigger drives and leaving the rest of the system intact.
The NAS is only used by me from a single computer and does not serve multiple users and is used primarily for bulk storage of high quality/bitrate videos.
Are you telling me that I can run 128TB off of only 64GB of RAM?
The 1GB per 1TB of space generalization is if you enable deduplication, which being you’re bulk storing videos will not benefit you at all. You can add additional drives or a disk shelf and be fine.
Well, if you have money to burn and just looking for a tech toy that doubles as an amazing server, might I interest you into one of the new TRx systems coming out this year?
Edit:
More seriously, no reason to upgrade unless you just want to; sometimes you don’t need a practical reason.
Thank you folks. Yeah, nothing but single user media consumption from the NAS. No VMs or fancy stuff, heck I’m still at 9.10 and haven’t upgraded in years.
There is one thing I’m worried about in all of this though. I currently have 10 x 6TB HDDs, and the build I have in mind for 128TB will have 8 x 16TB HDDs. I’m not sure how I can replace my drives and transfer my files at the same time. Do I need to build another NAS temporarily for data transfer?
As long as the VDEV(s) in your pool are set up with Redundancy, so either Zraid1,2,3 or ZFS Mirror, you can replace the drives one by one and rebuild from the partiy data.
Once you’ve finished replacing drives, the array can be expanded.
Whether this will work flawlessly in this case depends on how your current Vdevs are set up and how you’ll set up the new ones, you didn’t share enough Detail in that regard.
I would also like to urge you once again to upgrade the OS and possibly even the pool itself. ZFS and TrueNAS have gained a lot of new features that will come in handy.
Should be able to replace them two one at a time, with rebuilds in-between, I’d think? I mean, it will put the array at risk since you’re technically forcing a ‘degraded’ status by removing some of the redudant protections, but it’s basically the same process as if the drives had failed naturally.
lol others online recommending backing up the entire array first and/or using open ports to add new drive, migrate data over, and then take old drive offline ---- which assumes us basic NAS users didn’t just fill up all available slots on our storage array from the getgo woops XD
Heh, I’m afraid all the sata slots on the motherboard are occupied, and I’m such a basic user of FreeNAS that I’m not at all familiar with most of the functionality.
According to that article you linked, I should be safe enough by replacing one drive and a time and waiting for the rebuild to finish, then move on to the next one. having 2 drives redundant and removing one still gives me…well… redundancy
Yeah, I think people giving suggestions more involved than that plan have good info for business critical data, but meh if I lost all my Plex data due to an act of God deciding to fail all my storage arrays during a rebuild
¯\(ツ)/¯
Edit:
Can I ask why you didn’t go for a Synology or something? Their products are basically designed for basic users like me and you; it’s what I use as my NAS and I couldn’t be happier with it
Years ago when I learned that FreeNAS can protect you against things like random bitflips and silent data corruption, that’s when I made the choice. I don’t Synology or similar products can do that.
Eh, honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised; Synology is constantly bettering their software and I’m pretty sure their proprietary raid format and OS is just built off the backbone of open-source solutions like what you’re using.
More to the point though: I personally feel like that at the basic, consumer level it’s not really worth thinking about all those advance features because you’re usually not storing mission critical data on just your home NAS, ie. you generally have it backed up to a cloud solution like OneDrive or something anyway.
I’d just rather have a user friendly solution over a “better” solution for basic home use. Though, I have seen Synology pop up alot more in business work via YT creators and so on…
I think if I was in your position and level and knowledge/memory, I would simply replace 1 of the existing 6TB drive with a 12 or 16TB (of course letting FreeNAS know you are doing so) and see how it goes. If the re-silvering goes well, perhaps wait a week and do another. Keep doing it until you’ve replaced all of them, then expand the pool and voila, you have more space. You would of course be putting a lot of strain on the drives during this, and it could prompt more than 2 failed drives which would mean data loss.
This assumes you have a copy of the files elsewhere, because you never know, bad things happen. You might be best to do a SMART test and see if some drives are more worn out than others, then start the replacement routine with the most worn ones.
Another alternative would be getting 2 $30 LSI HBA’s (pre-flashed to IT Mode) and another power supply for 8 new hard drives. Hook them all up, create a new pool on those new drives and copy the information over. If the CPU/Motherboard/RAM are good, money might be better spent on drives than hardware to run them on. You’re only a backup config away from moving the pool to another machine if it ever starts playing up.
If it all goes well, I know that ‘if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it’ comes to mind with the current version of FreeNAS you’re running, but I would recommend going to TrueNAS Core.
Disclaimer: most other people commenting will know more than me about FreeNAS, so I’m only thinking of a cheap and easy method!
Well, one of the 6TB drives has been producing bad sectors for the past year or so. That will be replaced first. I ordered two Seagate Exos x18 18TB drives for now and will replace two disks for the time being, one at a time of course.
I’ll wait a while after replacing the first drive to see if there are any hiccups are warning. maybe I’ll upgrade to the latest FreeNAS 11.3 later. But it’s been 5 years since I setup this thing and I’ve completely forgotten how I did any of it.
Aye; those Exos drives are awesome value. Constantly cheaper than the NAS versions Seagate sells.
Be sure to give an update on how the process goe; I’m curious how much louder drives that dense get. I’ve seen people recommend avoiding them unless you can store the NAS them in a closet out of the way.
