FreeNas Questions

ste-sim2x9

ste-sim2x9

ste-sim2x9

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19 Jan 2009
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I'm new to networking storage, I've just built a system and installed FreeNas but need a few questions answered.

1. If i set my shares up as guest instead of adding users would that be ok., i mean no one that is not on my network could view them or am i wrong.

2. One of my hard drive is my media drive that's in my HTPC, will i have to copy the files to another drive before setting that drive up in freenas. I have all my music albums and backups of my blu-rays on it and don't want to lose them.
 
ste-sim2x9 said:
I'm new to networking storage, I've just built a system and installed FreeNas but need a few questions answered.

1. If i set my shares up as guest instead of adding users would that be ok., i mean no one that is not on my network could view them or am i wrong.


2. One of my hard drive is my media drive that's in my HTPC, will i have to copy the files to another drive before setting that drive up in freenas. I have all my music albums and backups of my blu-rays on it and don't want to lose them.
Click to expand...

1) Nothing wrong with allowing guest access, especially if its a home server, for a business envrionment I'd want passworded shares with appropriate permissions

2) I'm assuming this is an NTFS formatted drive, you can import it into FreeNAS however you will get terrible transfer speeds (~10MB/sec, mine on a 2 drive pool give me ~80MB/sec sustained) I'd advise moving the data then running the drive using ZFS

ZFS is a very powerful filesystem and offers a lot of different raid options.
 
as above, I recommend using ZFS and if you're worried about losing what data you have then consider RAIDZ (single parity)

This requires 3 disks and will still operate if one of those disks were to fail, giving you time to replace it.

I have 3x2tb which gives me 4tb for my media and protection from one drive failure.

Whatever you decide to do, plan ahead because changing your mind often means deleting drive pools and having to shift data around.

http://www.solarisinternals.com/wik...onfiguration_Requirements_and_Recommendations
 
Cheers guys, I'll have to get a spare drive and and move my data before i put the drive in my nas system and format to ZFS. My media drive in my htpc is 3tb and is half full, wish I thought about building a nas system before I built my htpc. Putting drives in raid is not really what I wanted to do, I'm only having 2 drives in my nas system, my 3tb drive from my htpc so I can access the files without having my htpc turned on and because i'm building another htpc for my bedroom and want to to use the same 3tb drive with all the media files. And a 500gb drive that's attached to my laptop via caddy with my backup software.
 
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+3 for ZFS.

My home server runs PC-BSD, boots of a pair of mirrored ZFS SSDs, has a 2 x 1TB mirrored drives as a backup area and 4 x 2TB drives in RAIDZ for media with a spare 2TB as a hot swap standby. I scrub the drives every week and when I did have a failing disk on my RAIDZ array, I rebuilt it without turning the machine off at all. In fact, it's been up 100 days (last reboot was due to a RCD trip whilst we were away).

I can saturate the Gbit link to it (write speeds are normally consistently above 100MB/sec - the only time they aren't is when the drives are doing a lot of seeking).

Put as much memory in as you can. ZFS loves memory (16G here). I'd also consider a UPS if you have lots of disks....
 
I'd recommend ditching the 500gb drive and buying a second 3TB drive to mirror the first, I know I wouldn't want backups on a single drive. ZFS and FreeNAS make raid inccredibly simple, its literally a case of ctrl + click to select the drives you want to use, name the storage pool and select the type of raid you want to use.

Edit: some sound advice above. I will be doing similar but 8x2tb in RAIDZ2 with 2 more drives as hot spares and possibly another 4x1tb in RAIDZ one in the same pool
 
ManLoveRulesOK said:
I'd recommend ditching the 500gb drive and buying a second 3TB drive to mirror the first, I know I wouldn't want backups on a single drive. ZFS and FreeNAS make raid inccredibly simple, its literally a case of ctrl + click to select the drives you want to use, name the storage pool and select the type of raid you want to use.

Edit: some sound advice above. I will be doing similar but 8x2tb in RAIDZ2 with 2 more drives as hot spares and possibly another 4x1tb in RAIDZ one in the same pool
Click to expand...

Going right over my head ha ha, I'm new to all this raidz, ZFS, raidz2 and pools, networked storage never really interested me until a few weeks ago so i'll have read up on all this.
 
To simplify it.

Pools are a set of drives which provide a single datastore, this can be made of single drives simply combining the storage capacity or multiple raid arrays

ZFS has its own set of RAID levels.

Mirror and Strip are self explanitory, more or less the same as RAID 0 or 1

RAIDZ (More specifically RAIDZ1) uses 3 drives minimum, you lose 1 drive to parity meaning 1 drive can fail yet the data remains intact, allowing to replace the failed drive and rebuild the pool
 
I could do with some more help if anyone is offering, I have setup a shares called Backup Files that has my laptop's windows image and drivers/software on. Only i want to be able to connect to it via my laptop so i created a user with password and set the permissions in storage and i put my user/password in but when i go to connect to the backup files shares it don't let me in. Anyone know what i could be doing wrong?, if i set a guest it lets me in fine without the user/pass.
 
Sounds like permissions. You can fix using chmod or the easier method is to go back to the user configuration and specify the home directory to be the path to the share you're having trouble with. That should update the permissions for you.
 
Uhtred said:
as above, I recommend using ZFS and if you're worried about losing what data you have then consider RAIDZ (single parity)

This requires 3 disks and will still operate if one of those disks were to fail, giving you time to replace it.
Click to expand...

so your saying i'd be best buying three 3tb drives and put them in mirror raidz. How does that work!
 
Right so one of the 3tb drives would be for backup, would that be hidden?.I've seen those western digital red network drives, are they better to use than the normal ones.
 
WD Reds are indeed better for NAS operation as that's what they are designed for.

1 of the drive isn't for backup the data is split and replicated across the three drives (See Here)

To do this you want all the drives in the system, with any data that you need to keep moved to a safe place nd open the FreeNAS interface.

From there click the storage button along the top row followed by Volume Manager in the storage dialogue.

Give the storage pool a name and select all three of the drives in member disks, followed by selecting the ZFS checkbox then RaidZ

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