NAS server via www.freenas.org

SoC · 20 Oct 2012 at 21:07

Looks like freenas has come of age. As soon as the relevant stock is in I will be taking the plunge. To keep it small I will be using the lian li q12a case and post results in the small form factor area. Any other forum members been working with freenas?

SoC

JonJ678 · 21 Oct 2012 at 02:49

FreeBSD is lovely. Freenas is a derivative intended to be quick/easy to set up for NAS purposes. Should be solid.

HP Microserver is the obvious alternative to the lian li. Enjoy

SoC · 21 Oct 2012 at 11:40

What i had in mind was using the the intel dh77df board as it has a mSATA connector on the board where the installation can sit rather than on an ugly USB flash. Also the 16G max. memory of this board could come in handy with ZFS. I guess to be fair I would prefer to get the asus h77 mini-itx board as it has more sata connectors but I'm not aware of any pci-e adapters for an mSATA which could be booted off. Do you have any suggestions?

R4z0r · 30 Oct 2012 at 19:36

I run FreeNAS with the HP Microserver. It has an internal USB so all drive bays are free for drives. I upgraded mine with 8GB RAM and an Intel GigE NIC, runs like a dream and I can get close to line rate Gig speeds.

If you don't use the optical bay you can free up space for another drive taking the total to 5.

SoC · 2 Nov 2012 at 20:43

Yes, very popular freenas hardware. It has been reported that there can be erratic transfer speeds with raidz. Have you experienced this issue R4z0r?

R4z0r · 4 Nov 2012 at 22:29

SoC said:
Yes, very popular freenas hardware. It has been reported that there can be erratic transfer speeds with raidz. Have you experienced this issue R4z0r?

Nope, always runs very well. If you have drives with 4K sectors make sure you format them with that option otherwise you'll get poor performance.

Uhtred · 6 Nov 2012 at 09:43

I use 2 Freenas boxes, an old Northwood machine at my parents and an HP micro server at my house (running on esxi). The backups sync with each other over rsync (ssh) so we all have offsite DR

It's a great little OS, I did manage to kill it once though by installing the 64bit update on the Northwood install (32bit) fml

Recovery was very easy though.

R4z0r said:
Nope, always runs very well. If you have drives with 4K sectors make sure you format them with that option otherwise you'll get poor performance.

**** - are you sure? My ST2000DM001 'reslivered' 800GB in under 7 hours without the 4k option.

It's not easy to test the performance as the two other drives in the RAIDZ volume are different models (until I can afford 2 more of the above)

http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...cking-out-hardware&p=6088&viewfull=1#post6088 - this post says not to worry too much, so I think I will leave it. I could remove it from the pool, wipe and resliver but I don't think it's worth the bother/risk in my case