N54L File server options ?

Randall8686 · 17 Apr 2016 at 21:41

So my Expenology has gone up the spout, I cant recover the Data and looking on the forums im not the only one to have suffered this. Thankfully i have another server that replicates it every 24 hours so nothing major lost. However i dont fancy running that system any more with some sort of hacked software.

Im looking at freenas ? has any one had and experience with this ? Seems i need to upgrade to 8gb ram but thats not an issue. I need a simple interface and mainly data backup and streaming media to all the "smart" devices around the house. I dont want anything i particularly need to maintain.

What ideas does everyone have ?

peterwalkley · 17 Apr 2016 at 21:52

I looked at freenas when I got my N54L but went for OpenMediaVault instead. Came across as easier to use and more polished. Been running it about 18 months with no issues. I run simple file shares, plex server and also MariaDB

Snapshot · 18 Apr 2016 at 07:39

NAS4free is worth a look. It's a more developed version of how freenas was before it was sold off. You'll still need 8GB RAM or even 16GB, depending on the amount of disk space and what RAID you use. I used 8GB with 4 x 2GB HDDs and RAIDZ1 and it worked well but RAIDZ does need at least 1GB RAM per TB of HDD.

ASE001 · 18 Apr 2016 at 08:17

I run a couple of NAS4FREE servers and one only has 1Gbyte of RAM, this streams movies using puppies built in DNLA server. The other has 5Gbytes of RAM, on this one I use Virtual Box which is now nicely plumped into the NAS4FREE web GUI, to run a pfsense firewall rooter and Debian server for miscellaneous bits and bobs.

Both are old AMD +3400 DDR2 systems I inherited and both do the job.
So it’s a thumbs up for NAS4FREE from me.

swain90 · 18 Apr 2016 at 08:55

peterwalkley said:
I looked at freenas when I got my N54L but went for OpenMediaVault instead. Came across as easier to use and more polished. Been running it about 18 months with no issues. I run simple file shares, plex server and also MariaDB

We ran OpenMediaVault and didn't have much luck. We couldn't figure out, how to transfer data locally so ended up having to go via the network, which takes away with 100's of GB of data.

Randall8686 · 18 Apr 2016 at 09:23

Cheers guys will look over these options, i dont mind paying for a good bit of software if there are better payware options. So long as they are not hundreds of pounds or a yearly thing, i have about 5tb worth of data i need to put on it currently and i use 2tb red drives (currently 5 drives) but will start building it with 3 drives.

swain90 · 18 Apr 2016 at 09:30

If you're willing to pay, why not just by a windows license and configure it that way?

Randall8686 · 18 Apr 2016 at 09:36

swain90 said:
If you're willing to pay, why not just by a windows license and configure it that way?

I want simplicity and tbh dont have enough exprience of configuring any windows server functions or OS.

swain90 · 18 Apr 2016 at 09:59

What are your main requirements?

fezster · 18 Apr 2016 at 10:27

Randall8686 said:
So my Expenology has gone up the spout, I cant recover the Data and looking on the forums im not the only one to have suffered this.

Could you elaborate on what the issue was?

Randall8686 · 18 Apr 2016 at 15:14

swain90 said:
What are your main requirements?

Main requirements are storage of Data, I dont need 24/7 access so happy to just have 1 drive as a redundancy as i have another NAS (genuine synology) also replicating the data an a single HDD off site that backs up critical files so i feel fairly secure in that respect. Feeding 2-3 HD streams to a couple of telly and maybe a tablet is the most work its going to see. Also a download client is handy. with maybe a bit of on the go access.

Could you elaborate on what the issue was?

Basically it decided in its wisdom to try and update its self to version 6 whilst i was away and clearly failed as expenology does not support this update yet. the unit was set not to update automatically however i think it had somthing to do with another application trying to update. I managed to downgrade back to the latest version supported by expenology but it cannot see my Volume that is on the disks and i cant find any information on getting it to see existing volumes. I have tried booting again saying restore setting and data and get nothing. If i force my way into the drive from a PC i can see the data is there but the synology software cannot see it. I simply cannot be bothered with faffing about with something that does not work 100% thank god i done have a single backup.

meandu229 · 18 Apr 2016 at 15:21

peterwalkley said:
I looked at freenas when I got my N54L but went for OpenMediaVault instead. Came across as easier to use and more polished. Been running it about 18 months with no issues. I run simple file shares, plex server and also MariaDB

Ive also gone for OMV(under esxii), got it running a fair few plugins, sabnzb etc. All works pretty well had some issues with installing mysql onto it so i manually installled docker (had to back port some kernel bits) and installed mysql inside there.
Been 100% solid since i installed last summer only 2 down times were power cut and restarting to enable the above kernel backports.
Has a pretty nice web gui and decent selection of plugins. I have mine set to use 1.9gb ram and its perfectly happy with all my plugins.

fezster · 18 Apr 2016 at 15:45

Randall8686 said:
Could you elaborate on what the issue was?

Basically it decided in its wisdom to try and update its self to version 6 whilst i was away and clearly failed as expenology does not support this update yet. the unit was set not to update automatically however i think it had somthing to do with another application trying to update. I managed to downgrade back to the latest version supported by expenology but it cannot see my Volume that is on the disks and i cant find any information on getting it to see existing volumes. I have tried booting again saying restore setting and data and get nothing. If i force my way into the drive from a PC i can see the data is there but the synology software cannot see it. I simply cannot be bothered with faffing about with something that does not work 100% thank god i done have a single backup.

That's worrying. From what you've read, was there any way to prevent it from auto updating?

I get a message every time I open the web console that an update is available (think it's 5644), but I've not bothered. Are you saying it can sometimes just do so automatically?

Randall8686 · 18 Apr 2016 at 16:53

No it seems a handfull of people have had theirs update. Its the first time its ever updated on its own. So now just decided that im going to give up with the fake synology keep my genuine for a backup and run another system altogether. Still u decided on what OS or raid type atm.

ASE001 · 18 Apr 2016 at 17:31

Randall8686 said:
Cheers guys will look over these options, i dont mind paying for a good bit of software if there are better payware options. So long as they are not hundreds of pounds or a yearly thing, i have about 5tb worth of data i need to put on it currently and i use 2tb red drives (currently 5 drives) but will start building it with 3 drives.

I have a number of 2TB drives RAID'd under ZFS on NAS4FREE, then I added an SSD drive, configured it as a ZFS cache drive. The compromise of having one SSD is that any writes still pending in the SSD cache will be lost if the SSD or power fails. Perhaps there is a way to set ZFS cache to write through, so writes don’t get cached?

One drawback with using a SSD as a ZFS cache drive is that the HDDs can go to sleep, and when you request data not cached it can take a few seconds to spin the HDDs up again. I never seen it media streaming but sometimes when I’m running a virtual host's DataStores from the NAS as NFS shares it happens. I suppose you could turn power saving off on the NAS and have the HDDs up and spinning all the time?

Might sound complicated, but I learned how to do it by watching YouTube. I imagine that other NAS OS's also offer something similar. It improved performance to a point that my network is now the bottle neck!

Randall8686 · 18 Apr 2016 at 18:30

ASE001 said:
I have a number of 2TB drives RAID'd under ZFS on NAS4FREE, then I added an SSD drive, configured it as a ZFS cache drive. The compromise of having one SSD is that any writes still pending in the SSD cache will be lost if the SSD or power fails. Perhaps there is a way to set ZFS cache to write through, so writes don’t get cached?

One drawback with using a SSD as a ZFS cache drive is that the HDDs can go to sleep, and when you request data not cached it can take a few seconds to spin the HDDs up again. I never seen it media streaming but sometimes when I’m running a virtual host's DataStores from the NAS as NFS shares it happens. I suppose you could turn power saving off on the NAS and have the HDDs up and spinning all the time?

Might sound complicated, but I learned how to do it by watching YouTube. I imagine that other NAS OS's also offer something similar. It improved performance to a point that my network is now the bottle neck!

What raid are you running zfs1 or 2 ?

Zfs2 seems a bit overkill to me. I can relace a single down drive in a few hours

peterwalkley · 18 Apr 2016 at 19:34

swain90 said:
We ran OpenMediaVault and didn't have much luck. We couldn't figure out, how to transfer data locally so ended up having to go via the network, which takes away with 100's of GB of data.

I use the unix command line for that sort of thing. Can't see an obvious way via the admin gui.

stewski · 18 Apr 2016 at 19:48

swain90 said:
We ran OpenMediaVault and didn't have much luck. We couldn't figure out, how to transfer data locally so ended up having to go via the network, which takes away with 100's of GB of data.

I think there is a webmin plugin for openmediavault and that has a basic web file explorer. I generally use command line for moving/copying local files.

I'm another long time openMediaVault user and I'll say it's rock solid and has a very friendly community of devs on the forum...

swain90 · 19 Apr 2016 at 16:58

peterwalkley said:
I use the unix command line for that sort of thing.

And this is why we gave it a miss, just little things like that were the final straw.

Much happier in a windows environment

CaNsA · 19 Apr 2016 at 18:19

peterwalkley said:
I looked at freenas when I got my N54L but went for OpenMediaVault instead. Came across as easier to use and more polished. Been running it about 18 months with no issues. I run simple file shares, plex server and also MariaDB

I rate OMV highly.
NFS, SMB, torrent, sqldb, acestream, and some other stuff i cant remember.

Support is great, and Volker (the project lead) was the original dev of FreeNAS but left due to disagreements on the direction the project was heading.