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NOS,

Currently, I have 4x 1TB seagate barracudas.... I know Feral ain't a fan of the Seagates, but since I have more dead Western Digital Drives at home than Seagates, I thought I'd give it a whirl.

I'll take some pics -- there's power and activity lights for each drive.

Everything is technically hot-swapable in my setup.. however, I haven't fully tested yet, since I'm running the nightly build alpha software and don't need to be experimenting too much.

As things run on open BSD, you can hotswap anything by taking it offline first, then swapping, then putting back online and remounting.... I know, unlike windows, hotswapping a USB device without first taking it offline will cause freeNAS to crash and reboot -- which could be the alpha state of the software, or a linux quirk.

To be honest, if you have to swap something, there's no realy hurt in shutting the system down and then bringing it back up (unless there's a read/write operation in progress), and considering this is home use, uptime in the event of a drive failure isn't my biggest concern.

You're absolutely right about shutting down. I'd probably chicken out unless I had a full OS drive image sitting there, waiting to be ghosted back on to the box. :P

I like Barracudas, personally. But, I've also had decent luck with WD and Maxtor drives (my 2 x 80GB Maxtor SATA1 drives are evidence of that).

Which PCIe cards did you use?

Steve, are you running a dedicated raid controller? Or software raid?

Just FYI - my 2 week run with FreeNAS was good, and even USB 1.1 drives worked well if not slowly for obvious reasons. I'm going to dump it into a 1U "blade" server that I have kicking around to see how it handles a hardware RAID controller (sound familar, Kev?).

I'm doing software RAID -- ZFS to be exact, which is much more robust than RAID5 and a good tradeoff for performance, robustness, and space.

My reason for going software RAID is simple. If I go with something RAID 5-like, and you blow a controller card, you stand to lose EVERYTHING on your disks if you can't replace it with an identical controller, since they all use different striping and parity algorithms that may not be compatible with each other.

With software RAID, if I lose a controller card, I just swap in another and I'm good to go. And I'm still able to get 70MB/s reads and 30-40MBps writes easily across my gigabit network.

However, freeNAS has a few quirks...

- it doesn't support SATA300 via multiple PCI Express cards very well. This results in a lot of DMA read/write issues that'll stop all file serving and require a hardboot.

- this same issue requires a lot of playing around with disk timeouts and transfer modes which don't always work as advertised.

- Samba support is quirky. You'll have to hit the forums to find settings to optimize your throughput and reduce client pipeline issues. Typical of Linux users, the blame is typically put on windows, but the changes need to be made on the linux server.

- if you're using ZFS, you need to make sure you configure it right the first time -- the web gui and os level commands aren't linked properly just yet, so changes made at the command line aren't reflected in the webgui, and once configured, it's very difficult to make changes outside of adding/removing a drive.

- the upgrade process isn't the most robust... I've lost data on occasion.

So there you have it.. there's a few quirks, but overall, it works well enough. I look forward to the point where it becomes more stable so it doesn't need to be babysat so much.

oh yeah... I'm using 2 x Sabrent PCI Express SATA cards... nice cards outside the fact that freeBSD doesn't seem to like multiple client file transfers over SATA300.

Second update - after pushing the install to a Compaq ProLiant DL360 P3-933 Xeon, 768MB RAM with 2 x 18GB 15K RPM U160 HDs in RAID1 (Compaq RAID controller)... it's a wicked improvement over the single 733MHz box with a single 80GB ATA100 drive.

Now I just need to build a new box so I can have the ultimate in a travesty - my Opteron 170 box with a whack of storage between the NVRAID and Sil3114 adapters. The only other reason I'd do that is for the built-in HTTP server with PHP.

Hopefully I can build a new-tech computer this year and retool the existing box as it would suit being a NAS nicely (lots of 3.5" bays, lots of 5.25" bays to accept drive bay stackers).

I just finished my new home NAS box with freenas. Not the largest most robust system out there, but i'm more comfortable with hardware failure now. The DNS-323 I had before was great, I didn't spend more than 30 minutes and I had tested drive failures, etc. Setup email notifications, user access and was done.

With FreeNAS theres just too much to play around with.

Intel Atom D945GCLF2 (dual core atom)
1 GB DDR2 Ram
2 Seagate 1TB Drives
1gb USB Drive for FreeNAS
Small ITX case with room for 3 drives.


Rather than using software raid. I am just using rsync to sync one drive to another. Pretty much same as a mirror, to me it just seems so very easy if there's a drive failure to recover when things are setup this way.

I've got many more hours of playing around with this. Anybody play with openfiler and compare with freenas?

What are you using for network fabric and what kind of throughput are you getting, Kev?

I was getting 70-75Mbps on average while transferring 9.6GB of data from a SATA1 80GB 7200RPM mirror (on Sil3114) to the 17GB data portion of the Compaq server. That's on a 3COM 24-port 100Mbit unmanaged switch, FD connections for both comps.

About the same on my setup, running everything through my linksys router 100mbit FD hardwired connections.

Hoping to one day upgrade to 1gbit lan but thats in the future.

The transfer speeds are about the same over 1GB connection, but you can get a bit more with more connections.

I finally gave up with SATA300, and installed a 4 port SATA150 PCI card to put the drives onto. .. will see if this is more stable than the SATA300.

Lastnight, I tried to turn off write caching, and ended up losing my whole server configuration. But as luck would have it, a quick 'scrub' of the ZFS filesystem after reconfiguring the pool brought everything back online. .. whew.... would have had to re-rip about 200Gb of movies if the data went AWOL.

Unfortunately, freenas shows it's immaturity. I would appreciate a better response to my questions than, "downgrade your hardware"...

lesson for today... stay with your older hardware boys.

hardk0re,May 14 2009, 12:26 AM Wrote:I just finished my new home NAS box with freenas.  Not the largest most robust system out there, but i'm more comfortable with hardware failure now.  The DNS-323 I had before was great, I didn't spend more than 30 minutes and I had tested drive failures, etc.  Setup email notifications, user access and was done.

With FreeNAS theres just too much to play around with.

Intel Atom D945GCLF2 (dual core atom)
1 GB DDR2 Ram
2 Seagate 1TB Drives
1gb USB Drive for FreeNAS
Small ITX case with room for 3 drives.


Rather than using software raid.  I am just using rsync to sync one drive to another.  Pretty much same as a mirror, to me it just seems so very easy if there's a drive failure to recover when things are setup this way.

I've got many more hours of playing around with this.  Anybody play with openfiler and compare with freenas?
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open filer doesn't seem to support UPnP services (without pay-for updates anyways)... and doesn't support ZFS. It also looks like it's a much more basic system with little support and a lot of unknowns -- I don't even know what OS it's based on.

I'd stick with freeNAS. If you're not interested in ZFS, stick with 0.69 and you should be fine.

I'm going to build an AD site/domain and see how FreeNAS handles Kerberos-based AD user authentication.

I guess I'll need to start saving for that new comp eh?

I've got dual NICs in that server at home as well, not sure if FreeNAS has any failover support yet. Going to try that out tonight as well. :) I'm only running on one NIC currently.

NOS2Go4Me,May 14 2009, 10:03 AM Wrote:I'm going to build an AD site/domain and see how FreeNAS handles Kerberos-based AD user authentication.

I guess I'll need to start saving for that new comp eh?

I've got dual NICs in that server at home as well, not sure if FreeNAS has any failover support yet. Going to try that out tonight as well. :) I'm only running on one NIC currently.
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NOS, you can set up two interfaces on freeNAS, and split the resources across them, however, I don't know if it does failover if you bind a service to an interface.

Here's what I'm seeing with GB ethernet and a couple of computers copying large files and watching a movie at the same time...

Not a massive amount of throughput. Gonna tweak it some, DP?

Love the name tho :P

I'm not becoming a big fan of freenas -- just keep getting odd bugs and errata -- and it's due to the immaturity of the software being used.

while it's a clean interface and works well with older equipment, it's really having a hard time with newer, faster equipment.

I'm really tempted at this point to switch to Ubuntu and install ZFS and other components as needed. Lot more effort with compiling and all that mess, but I bet it would be a lot more stable than freenas.

so far -- if you want a reliable platform that never crashes, stay away from freeNAS. It's a nice playtoy, but not very reliable IMO.

My freenas has been troublefree since setup, zero issues. VERY happy with it. So far its been running for 12 days and no crashes or trouble. Then again I don't ask much of it, just store my files on a SMB share, host a simple website, iscsi target for vms, download torrents and perform a few rsync operations every 6 hours.

DP maybe you want to checkout openfiler? Throughput on that when running multiple VM's is much better than freenas, as freenas crashes under load from too many vm's like powering up a dozen or so at once freenas takes a dump.
Not that your running vm's off it, but it showes it is rather superior in terms of throughput.

the ironic thing is that it's my SMB share that's been causing all my grief lately. Once I downgraded from SATA300 to SATA150... my SMB driver started throwing paging errors -- so it's not dealing with memory well at all.

I may give ubuntu a shot -- see if a more robust OS will help.

But weren't you running 0.7? Why not give up on ZFS and just use 0.69 for now?

FreeNAS at home and at work (test env) works great. Work has two PowerEdge 500SCs - one rysncs from one ATA drive to the other, the second server rsyncs from the first server. That's 0.69.1.

The only time I found it to be slow was running the rsync client on a P3-733MHz Coppermine box with 384MB of RAM. That dogged for some reason. In standalone mode, it's fine.