Hey everyone, I recently discovered Tek Syndicate and have really enjoyed the youtube channel so far, and by extension have high hopes of the community. I've recently moved into a new house and had planned on building a NAS box for backup purposes and multimedia distribution. After hearing people talk so positively about ZFS, I've decided to try out FreeNAS for myself. I have mild experience in Linux desktop environments, and I've really enjoyed gnome, so I'll be attempting to transfer all of my pc's to Linux as the primary OS here shortly, but I digress.
So I have some questions about setting up my NAS hardware before I get started. I've got some spare parts I've pieced together pretty inexpensively that I'd like to stick to if possible, but I understand that FreeNAS can really accomplish some great things when given some extra memory and other resources. Right now I've put together an MSI 760GM-P23FX with a Sempron 145 (2.8GHz single core, 1MB cache) and 2x4gb dimms of patriot viper memory, all of which I acquired for about $30. So far I've assembled these components, along with a basic 500W PSU and a cheap 120GB SSD from the Patriot Blaze line I had sitting around.
My first big question for starters here is how inhibited will I be with starting on this hardware? Also how difficult would it be to upgrade my motherboard and processor when I have the money to afford it? I understand drivers might be less of an issue with this OS, but I'm unfamiliar with how much configuration is done during the initial installation. My second big topic is that of storage. I'm in the middle of reading an article here regarding the parity structure that raidz-1 uses, and hopefully it will answer my questions, but maybe someone here will be able to answer them in more lamens terms. I have yet to purchase my storage drives. I've read articles about how reliable Hitachi's Deskstar NAS drives are in enterprise environments, but at $170 per 4tb drive, needing (I believe) 3 drives to start, $510 is a pretty big initial investment on storage considering the hardware I'm sitting on right now. I was considering 2TB options, but I haven't seen NAS versions from HItachi at that capacity. As far as the total capacity I'll need goes, I'm estimating initially about 2-4TB of usable storage, which should last me a couple years until I would need to add more drives. Speaking of which, I haven't yet read anything on how zfs expansion works, so if anyone has a good article/post on that, I would appreciate the link. I'm assuming I can add even numbers of drives to the pool in raidz-1 configuration, and haven't seen if it's possible to add oddly sized drives if I have extras sitting around. If it is possible to run with a collection of spare, oddly sized drives, I might well be able to start with a few Seagate Barracudas I have sitting in a couple of my current machines after upgrading them to something like WD Black drives for my main 2 gaming rigs. On top of the 2 2TB and 1 1TB barracudas, I could also contribute a WD Blue and Green 1TB each from my workstation, again only if it's possible to add all of these to the pool, and after replacing these drives and transferring data. My biggest concern with the idea of cycling out these drives would be that they consume more power than I'd desire when running all the time and not necessarily being used heavily for simple weekly backups, in which case I'm wondering if it would be worth saving up and dropping the initial cost on the NAS drives up front, which would also enable be to ignore any issues I might deal with in having a collection of misfit drives in my new backup server. The only problem here is that it may take me a few months to come up with that extra initial investment, depending on how pleasant my bills look at the new place, whereas I may be able to get started with the drives I have in fairly short order after shuffling some data around.
Still shopping for hard drives. Does anyone use the Toshiba PH3300U-1I72 in their NAS? Newegg has the 3tb model on sale today for pretty cheap.
edit> I've decided to throw some 500gb drives I had laying around in to go ahead and start playing with the software, let's see what I can do. I'm still curious if anyone knows what the maximum drive count is that Western Digital likes to refer to on their Red series. I read around and my best theory is that it's a vibration thing, that there's no literal maximum number of drives you can have attached to a single machine.
First off, you need ECC RAM. Without it, you are asking for data corruption. If you want an explanation, cyberjock on the freenas forums made a good post called "ECC vs non-ECC RAM and ZFS", I'd read that. To get ECC RAM, that means different board, processor, and ram that all supports it. You also need to know what sata chipset you have. Marvell doesn't play nice with ZFS due to poor FreeBSD support. Really you need an IBM m1015, DELL H200, or DELL H310 HBA card. I cross flash mine back to stock LSI firmware in IT mode.
Second, look at raidz2. If one hard drive dies, chances are another will die during the rebuild. Rebuilding involves copying all the data to the new disk which stresses the remaining ones. Best to do raidz2 for general backup and nas which allows for two disk failures and you will only lose the zpool if you lose a third.
Now for the rest. You can use different sized disks and then you are bound to the max capacity of the smallest drive. So if you have one 300gb and 3 1tb, it will be as if you have 4 300gb drives. I suggest only using the same sized drives. You also have to take into account the type of drive. Using something like a WD blue or green is just asking for data loss. If the drive isn't designed for enterprise or nas use, the specs are based on being used so many hours a day and not 24/7. The parts wear down and soon you'll have the click of death and then you will probably lose more during the rebuild. I get 2TB oem drives cheap, like $50 each. They are Hitachi ultrastar which is enterprise grade and rated for 24/7 use. They are old manufactures, but still quality drives and as cheap as they are you can have a spare without breaking the bank. Also, I like to have my zpools in groups of 6 disks and then create another zpool. This adds safety since the data isn't on one huge zpool that could crash and burn.
If you don't care about data integrity or loss, then go ahead with your current build. If you don't want to lose data, then you need new hardware. You can get previous gen 1366 socket servers cheap on ebay, go with cheap 2tb drives, raidz2, and an HBA card.
I'm running raiz2 right now on those 500gb drives (4), and I've read up on the differences between that and raidz1. I appreciate your other recommendations but for now this system is simply having a 2nd place to set and organize my data. For the most part, I've already got schemes for keeping my important data in multiple locations, what I'm trying to accomplish with this project (until I have a few hundred dollars to spend on a well-built NAS seeing as how I just finished purchasing a house) is to organize all of my tools and bootable images and what-not while learning how to set up FreeNAS to run and meet my needs, and maybe as a central host for my music.
That being said, I do tend to invest in quality parts so when it does actually come time to buy hard drives, RAM, etc, I do plan on looking at higher quality products. In regards to the $50 Hitachi drives you were referring to, are you talking about something like this? I believe they've seen a lot of use, and I bought one at one time and heard a lot of clicking and whining noises as the drive performed. If this is the case with the drives you use, I may have to find some place more isolated for my box than where it currently sits.
Thanks for your advice, I'll take a look into the error correcting RAM article you mentioned.
The drives I get are new oem drives. Ultrastar A7K2000 2TB HUA722020ALA330. Sometimes the sata3 drives are about the same and I get those since they usually have a newer manufacture date. You can find them on ebay or goharddrive. Just make sure you get new drives and not refurbished. When I order them, I test them for a few hours and then check the smart data and if there are already bad sectors, I send them back for replacements.
I wouldn't trust any data on your current setup or do backups from it since you could potentially be backing up bad data if you are using it as primary storage. At least you can play with freenas and get a feel for it. There are several plugins that make installing things like plex easy. Just keep in mind that if you have 8GB of ram, that's the min for zfs and plugins will eat more and so problems can happen since you'll be out of ram.