NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

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Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

So what's the consensus on btrfs? It has no fsck and raid capabilities yet does it?

# ¿ Dec 30, 2010 17:08

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 10:39

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

I've been pretty unhappy with my WD green performance (yep, I didnt read before I bought them) in my mdadm Raid 5 array at home.

I'm taking a bit of a leap of faith and got 3 of these. Did a little reasearch on Google and the [H] forums. They're pretty new so not very well tested for "long term use" but I'm going to give it a shot.

Did I make the right choice?

They seem to be 512k sectors which is good.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2011 18:58

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Any recommendations on RAID cards with 6 SATA ports for an out of warranty Dell Poweredge 1800 server running Win2k3?

Boss is too cheap to replace the machine so this looks like my only option. We had 2 drives die in an array last night and Dells website is total poo poo.

It's out of warranty so I don't feel too badly putting in a non dell part if that's my best option.

Only requirement is the card supports 2TB drives, the current card maxes out at 500GB and we've outgrown the storage this server provides.

I'd rather just replace the drat thing but good lord Dell charges a lot for what I'm looking for. Has to run windows as my boss is only comfortable with Backup Exec (and I loving hate it).

EDIT: Am I asking in the wrong place here? If so I completely apologize.

Matt Zerella fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Feb 8, 2011

# ¿ Feb 8, 2011 17:36

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

I'll check that out. So I can just use SAS to SATA adapters and I'm good to go? Any speed degradation by using the adapters? Sorry, I'm a little bit clueless here.

I'd do software RAID but the server doesn't have a ton of RAM, and is under a decent constant load.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2011 18:14

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Done and done, thanks guys. I told my boss next year this box gets replaced.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2011 20:46

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

^^ poo poo, thanks for the info. I already picked up the 5i though with the battery backup on ebay.

Got the adapters, I don't have the backplane so I picked up the SAS -> 4 SATA like you said.

Thanks for the info though!

# ¿ Feb 10, 2011 16:45

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Thanks everyone for the PERC 5/i recommendation. Got the card in (removed the old one) and the arrays are building now. Going to be a scary 16 hours with no backups running tonight.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2011 18:20

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Any PERC experts here? This is driving me bananas.

I have the latest driver disk, and I believe I have the latest firmware update for it 5.2.2-0072.

Do I need to step through every firmware update or can I jump from 5.0.1-0030 (the current one) right to this one?

# ¿ Feb 15, 2011 17:21

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Hok posted:

Just install the latest, no need to do it in stages. If you have problems do it from a bootable usb key

Done, thanks to you and lilbean.

It was not fun digging through Dell's FTP to find the proper update and driver, but it's all running again with 6TB of space and my backups are humming along.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2011 18:51

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

jeeves posted:

I just noticed a lot more PCI-E controller cards having internal SAS ports than SATA ports. Which is good because apparently according to this cable an internal SAS port supports 4x SATA, meaning a card with 1x internal SAS (much more common than 4x internal SATA) would theoretically support 4x SATA?

Yep, you nailed it. I have this set up with a PERC5i at work. 8x 2GB sata drives hanging off it for my first disk backup stage.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2011 20:53

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

idolmind86 posted:

I have a small business and I am also trying to go paperless in my personal life as well and am looking for a safe place to keep my business and personal files. Keep in mind I would not plan on keeping a paper copy of most of them, anywhere.

Currently, I use dropbox but I'm running out of space and don't want to pay a monthly fee. Additionally, there is increasing concern about our (USA) lawmakers lack of understanding of technology and keeping personal things in "the cloud".

So, I'd like a cheap, relatively simple solution for keeping things safe at home. I've been looking at enclosures and drives and am thinking I want something like:
- A 2 bay enclosure
- 2TB storage space
- RAID 1

So, can anyone recommend something out of the box? Or a separate enclosure/drive setup? I'm really not looking to build a server and I want something I can pull/replace the drives on if I want. I've seen several things on newegg that look like they work but I just don't want to blindly purchase something.

I've deployed Netgear ReadyNas Pro 2 devices at 2 of our small offices and they work great so far. Both are the 2TB versions. They don't have hotswap replacement but replacing the drives isn't very hard.

# ¿ May 3, 2011 18:47

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

So I'm rebuilding my home machine. One thing, I'm switching from Debian6/mdadm RAID5 to OpenIndiana/napp-it/zfs and I need to get all my poo poo over to it.

I have an external drive to back everything off to. Can I just install ZFS-Fuse under debian and set that external as ZFS, copy stuff over (yeah, I know it'll be slow), export it and then import it on the new hardware/OpenIndiana? I'm pretty sure ZFS-FUSE is a few revisions behind what OI has, but it's backwards compatible right?

EDIT: Im an idiot, I just tested this out with 2 VMs and it worked great. Looks like this is the plan. Sorry if I poo poo up the thread.

Matt Zerella fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Jul 21, 2011

# ¿ Jul 21, 2011 16:42

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

teamdest posted:

I don't see why you couldn't format the external as plain old ext4 or whatever and get a bit better speed. Are you planning to keep the external in the ZFS pool after conversion?

From what I've read, OpenIndiana does not support ext4. Am I wrong here?

# ¿ Jul 22, 2011 21:32

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

teamdest posted:

I honestly didn't even think of that, actually. I'm so used to operating in Deb/Ubuntu/Centos I forget how narrow some stuff is in terms of options and tools. Sorry, yea I guess ZFS is the way to go then. is XFS or JFS an option? I don't know OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana etc. very well.

No idea. But I formatted the drive last night, and rsynced. Let me say, a USB Hd plus ZFS-Fuse is slowwwwww. Took 18 hours to transfer 1.4 TB.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2011 20:58

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Well, the rebuild is going to be a lot better. I have an IBM 6gbps LSI card coming, and I'm upgrading to a Supermicro motherboard with 8GB of ECC ram. The HD array is 3 7k3000 Hitachi drives. Definitiely expecting a lot better out of that once my parts arrive.

The slow speeds were fine for me considering ZFSFUSE is not kernel plus USB transfer speeds are kind of meh.

I also have a 30gb SSD but I'm not sure if streaming files from SMB shares really benefit from a L2ARC drive though maybe that will help with a time machine share. But I may just use it as a boot drive.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2011 15:40

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

RAID5 certainly doesn't suck, but some of us are :spergin:

about BIT ROT. Or prefer the robustness that ZFS offers.

As long as you remember that neither of these solutions are backup, you can go with whatever you want.

Searching NewEgg shows 4 bay units that are eSATA/USB2 at about 499. Without drives. If you're technically inclined, you can roll a decent solution based on an AMD Fusion or Intel Atom that's passively cooled. Or just get one of the above mentioned units.

I cannot speak to this product, but this looks like what you might want:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111074

# ¿ Jul 26, 2011 16:39

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Are BitTorrent downloads directly to a ZFS pool a bad idea? Would I be better served using my 30GB SSD as a ZIL/L2ARC disk? Or should I just not worry about this?

# ¿ Jul 26, 2011 16:49

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Last night I rebuilt my NAS, installed OpenIndiana and tried to import my single disk vdev on a USB drive and it throws this error:

code:

  pool: backup
    id: 16987408378758075283
 state: UNAVAIL
status: One or more devices contains corrupted data.
action: The pool cannot be imported due to damaged devices or data.
   see: [url]http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-5E[/url]
config:

        backup      UNAVAIL  insufficient replicas
          c8t0d0p0  UNAVAIL  corrupted data

The USB drive was created with zfs-fuse on Ubuntu 11.04

Here's the output of "zdb -l /dev/dsk/c8t0d0p0"

code:

--------------------------------------------
LABEL 0
--------------------------------------------
    version: 23
    name: 'backup'
    state: 1
    txg: 12984
    pool_guid: 16987408378758075283
    hostid: 1463810815
    hostname: '********'
    top_guid: 2211610224871490532
    guid: 2211610224871490532
    vdev_children: 1
    vdev_tree:
        type: 'disk'
        id: 0
        guid: 2211610224871490532
        path: '/dev/disk/by-id/usb-WD_My_Book_1110_574341563539393337333530-0:0'
        whole_disk: 0
        metaslab_array: 23
        metaslab_shift: 33
        ashift: 9
        asize: 999496876032
        is_log: 0
        create_txg: 4
--------------------------------------------
LABEL 1
--------------------------------------------
    version: 23
    name: 'backup'
    state: 1
    txg: 12984
    pool_guid: 16987408378758075283
    hostid: 1463810815
    hostname: '******'
    top_guid: 2211610224871490532
    guid: 2211610224871490532
    vdev_children: 1
    vdev_tree:
        type: 'disk'
        id: 0
        guid: 2211610224871490532
        path: '/dev/disk/by-id/usb-WD_My_Book_1110_574341563539393337333530-0:0'
        whole_disk: 0
        metaslab_array: 23
        metaslab_shift: 33
        ashift: 9
        asize: 999496876032
        is_log: 0
        create_txg: 4
--------------------------------------------
LABEL 2
--------------------------------------------
    version: 23
    name: 'backup'
    state: 1
    txg: 12984
    pool_guid: 16987408378758075283
    hostid: 1463810815
    hostname: '******'
    top_guid: 2211610224871490532
    guid: 2211610224871490532
    vdev_children: 1
    vdev_tree:
        type: 'disk'
        id: 0
        guid: 2211610224871490532
        path: '/dev/disk/by-id/usb-WD_My_Book_1110_574341563539393337333530-0:0'
        whole_disk: 0
        metaslab_array: 23
        metaslab_shift: 33
        ashift: 9
        asize: 999496876032
        is_log: 0
        create_txg: 4
--------------------------------------------
LABEL 3
--------------------------------------------
    version: 23
    name: 'backup'
    state: 1
    txg: 12984
    pool_guid: 16987408378758075283
    hostid: 1463810815
    hostname: '*******'
    top_guid: 2211610224871490532
    guid: 2211610224871490532
    vdev_children: 1
    vdev_tree:
        type: 'disk'
        id: 0
        guid: 2211610224871490532
        path: '/dev/disk/by-id/usb-WD_My_Book_1110_574341563539393337333530-0:0'
        whole_disk: 0
        metaslab_array: 23
        metaslab_shift: 33
        ashift: 9
        asize: 999496876032
        is_log: 0
        create_txg: 4

Am I hosed? I think it has something to do with the PATH pointing to disk by id since this is OpenIndiana, but I have no idea if a) thats the problem and b)how to edit that if it's even possible. Anyone have some ideas? I've been google searching all morning but it's been a lot to digest.

I tried importing with the -f option and it says theres a problem with the VDEV but the drive looks fine (as stated above).

# ¿ Aug 3, 2011 16:16

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Welp, I solved my previous mentioned problem. Made a VM and gave it direct access to the USB drive.

Here's what I learned from my research, ZFS-FUSE does some weird stuff. I've always been told use the entire disk for ZFS, let the filesystem do it's thing. Well, apparently ZFS-FUSE doesn't create a partition type that's standard to ZFS (or create one at all for that matter). When you zpool create in Solaris/FreeBSD/OI/Nexenta, apparently it automatically creates a partition, while fuse just formats the raw drive. That's what OI didnt like when I tried to import it (even though I could query the filesystem metadata from within OI).

Lesson of the story? Make sure if you're using FUSE to point zfs to a parittion on a hard drive (sda1), not the entire thing (sda).

Or maybe I'm an idiot that can't read directions.

Thank god for Virtualbox.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2011 14:27

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

gregday posted:

Well I can't get ZFS native on Linux to work. I built and installed the 0.6.0rc5 of spl and zfs, and the kernel modules all appear to load, but when I run any zpool commands, I get an error that the modules aren't in the kernel. I'm using Linux 2.6.32 so I don't know what the hell.

I just tested out the DEB instructions on their site and had it up and running in about 3 minutes (Debian 6). What distro are you using?

# ¿ Aug 4, 2011 20:41

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

BnT posted:

I'd be looking for a torrent client that could handle seeding a couple hundred torrents without crashing, or needing to be restarted/babysat. Typically only one to five of these are actually active at a time.

As for downloading, even if it's a script that runs periodically on the NAS against my RSS feeds, that'd be fine. As long as I don't have to manually upload a torrent to the NAS every time I want to download something.

Basically I'm just looking to deliver and seed TV content on a quiet, low-power, and stable platform without much daily micromanagement.

Rtorrent+screen or deluge will do this with incredibly low overhead. Deluge has RSS built in and you can run the front end on your workstation or use the CLI frontend through ssh.

Personally I use tmux+rtorrent with watch directories. Uses under 10 megs of ram seeding 100+ torrents.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2011 00:29

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

I've been fooling around with Nexenta Core on a VM, it's pretty nice. I love that its got APT and a linux userland.

Does it lag behind OpenIndiana? I remember reading somewhere tha tthe napp-it developer recommends OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, Nexenta in that order. (I'm not trying to start a flamewar or argument, I'm just genuinely curious).

It looks like OI and Nexenta are both on ZFSv22.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2011 15:01

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Puddin posted:

Whats the concensus on Hitachi drives now since that firmware fiasco years back? Have they got their poo poo together?

Also, are 4k sector drives still an issue with RAIDZ and manual alignment needed or is that 4k mode setting in FreeNAS enough, or should I stick to 512b sector drives?

I've got 3x5k3000 at home in a raidz setup and they've been nothing but reliable.

I have 3x7k3000 (or whatever they're called) here at work in our BackupExec server running 24/7 for the last 5 months and they've also been rock solid.

It's anecdotal, I know but I jumped right in and they've been great.

Stick to the 512 byte drives, it reduces the amount of configuration you have to do (though not by much).

# ¿ Aug 17, 2011 15:45

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

So it looks like our 32 bit Backup Exec 2010 setup won't backup Exchange 2010 on x64, so time to replace our aging Dell backup server with something new.

The problem is, the Dell offerings i'm looking at are only SATAII, and their hard drive prices are RIDICULOUS. I figure if I'm going for brand new I might as well go for the newest.

Should I be looking elsewhere like HP or IBM?

Basically I'm looking for something that's a tower formfactor, will hold 6-8 drives and has SATA3 and decent hard drive prices. I don't need tape because we do d2d2d and the third "d" is offsite in our DR facility. Drive trays/easy hard drive access would be nice, no hot swap needed.

I'll go through Dell if I have to, but I'm just not well versed on what else is out there.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2011 15:52

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

drat, sorry about the mispost, thanks for the info!

# ¿ Sep 7, 2011 17:20

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

If I put a SATA2 drive on my M1015 with SASto4xSATA cable that has 3xSATA3 5k3000 drives on it already, will it slow everything down to SATA2? Would it just be better to put it on my motherboards controller which is SATA2?

I got a smallish SSD on sale and want to add a read cache (I don't want to use a consumer level SSD as a write cache and I get pretty decent write performance anyway).

# ¿ Sep 17, 2011 22:50

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

moron posted:

I'm about to pull the trigger and build myself a NAS box. I want quite a bit of space, and a bit of redundancy, so I was thinking of building a FreeNAS box with four drives using RAID-Z1. I just wanted to check that my planned specs would be adequate, as the specs on the FreeNAS website leave me a bit puzzled

I was thinking of basing the system around a Zotac NM10-F-E motherboard (w/Atom CPU), 4GB RAM, 4x2TB HDDs, plus a low capacity 2.5" HDD I had lying around to install FreeNAS 8 on.

Is 4GB enough memory to use ZFS with FreeNAS 8? Looking at the system specs here, it seems to suggest that 6GB is required to use ZFS.

Or, alternatively, should I just use FreeNAS 7 instead? I already have a Mac Mini server which caters for all my torrent/NZB needs, so those features in v7 wouldn't be of any use to me. Would FreeNAS 7 be a better choice considering I'm using low powered hardware?

rtorrent and sabnzbd need very few resources to run.

4gigs is fine for ZFS, but the big question is, do you want to spend a little extra money and go for ECC RAM, which isn't supported by Atom.

Unless you're using compression or dedupe (which aren't even available in FreeNAS right now) the Atom will handle it fine. The only time you'll encounter slowdown are for scrubs which should be running when you're asleep on a weekly basis.

Personally, I shelled out the extra for a Supermicro board and ECC ram but I also had an E6300 Core2Duo lying around (still uses way more power than an Atom but I use the machine for transcoding and other things so I don't mind the extra horsepower).

Matt Zerella fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Sep 23, 2011

# ¿ Sep 23, 2011 19:17

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

PraxxisParadoX posted:

Mind sharing what you tweaked exactly?

Seconded. I get awful SMB performance on FBSD8. I'm running a CURRENT build so it may just be buggy but it's pretty bad.

EDIT: This could also be my wireless router or Lion's fault too so I'm not sure.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2011 17:32

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Goon Matchmaker posted:

SMB under FBSD has always been bad. When I was building my first NAS and still had a hardon for FBSD, I spent hours tweaking things to try to get more than 15MB/s out of the machine. I eventually gave up and installed Linux. I went from 15MB/s to being able to max out a gig-e link and that was before tuning.

I went with FBSD for native ZFS and a stable ports branch (OpenIndiana is awful if you want to do more with it than run a NAS). loving rtorrent crashes constantly on OI/Nexenta using both the pkg install and compiling with the Solaris patches.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2011 18:15

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

diremonk posted:

I've got an odd request that maybe someone smarter than me can help me with.

I would like to move away from using my current NAS (iomega home 1TB) because it is starting to make a buzzing noise when left on for more than two or three days. While I would love to buy the microstation, I just can't at the moment. But I have a couple of older systems that I could use.

What I would like to do is backup my desktop and laptop, have a video archive, run SABNZBD, and if possible stream the videos to my laptop while I'm stuck at work or at school. I've been looking around and subsonic server seems to fit my needs. Anyone have experience with it?

The systems I would like to use are a Sempron or a Core2Duo. I'm leaning towards the Core2Duo just because it already has windows on it and has 4 SATA ports. If I go that route, should I keep windows xp on it, or go with linux distro that is tailored towards being a NAS?

If you're familiar with Linux/Samba, you can have a Debian/Ubuntu server up in an hour or two (depending on the size of your RAID array and type). There's really no need to go with a NAS tailored distro unless you want ZFS.

You can install Samba/SSH/Webmin during setup of Debian and be good to go pretty quickly and do all of your configuration through a web browser if you're uncomfortable going through the commandline.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2011 14:21

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

I've been playing around with BTRFS on Ubuntu 11.10 in a VM, I have to say, I'm pretty impressed. Gave the machine 1 gig of ram, created a 4 drive RAID10 array copied over about 16 gigs worth of ISO files and the CPU/RAM usage was incredibly low.

Apparently it supports scrubbing and defrag now.

I do nightly backups to an external hard drive, and I've been getting pretty awful performance with FreeBSD over SMB/AFP lately. Looks like I might make the switch this weekend.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2011 19:00

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

crm posted:

I just discovered that the FreeNAS guys abandoned the way they used to have stuff installed and I can no longer install extra services (sabnzbd, etc) on v8.

The v7 install I have can no longer pkg_add stuff because the FreeBSD 7.3 ftp repo appears to have disappeared.

What else is there that I can host all my stuff on?

One pre-requisite is that it can run all my little python / java server apps, and that it can read a UFS drive.

Any recommendations?

Why not just use vanilla FreeBSD? The ports collection will let you use just about anything, native ZFS. There's even a web based ZFS control panel called ZFS Guru that's pretty easy to install. It even has pkg_add if you don't want to use the ports directory tree.

EDIT: I figured out why I was getting such lovely SMB/AFP speeds. My router was on channel 6 and theres about 15 other APs on the same one. Switched to 11 and it's way better.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2011 02:49

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Raukowath posted:

I have read far too much of this thread and it has all started to blend together, and I have been putting off building a new small server with storage to function as a NAS along with a few piddly tasks here and there.

So far, the HP Microserver looks like a very nice deal and upgrade to what I am currently (and have been for going on 8 year) using. Perspective: It is a P3-800 with 4 120GB drives in a raid5 w/ hot spare, so I certainly need an upgrade at this point and decided to throw aside parts of a couple paychecks to get a more robust solution.

Also, I have not messed with RAID in any sense for about 6 years, and even before that it was always higher end server hardware raid solutions, which I will not have available to me.

So my question basically boils down to. If I was to get the microserver, upgrade the RAM, throw in 4 1 or 1.5TB drives, install debian, would that give adequate performance for the occasional backing up, storage and reading if I was to go with a software based RAID. And is ZFS/RAIDZ the 'goto' for software RAID at this point? Also, do the 'Green' drives have issues being in raid, hardware or software, still? I remember hearing about that being a problem.

Any suggestions or tips would be greatly appreciated, I've been out of this game for far too long.

As mentioned above, you shouldn't really use ZFS on Linux.

However, you can use kFreeBSD which is the Debian userland/package manager built on top of FreeBSD and provides native ZFS support. Or you could go to regular FreeBSD which is a bit different from Linux, but it's not too bad.

ZFS itself is pretty drat simple to get up and running, the hard part, especially if you're not familiar with BSD/Linux is sharing out the drives. Installing BSD is a little confusing too, but the installer on 9.0RC1 is MUCH improved to the point where it's easier than Debian to set up.

I'm currently running FreeBSD 9.0RC1 (disabled debugging by recompiling the kernel) with a m1015 controller (flashed to IT mode) and 4x2TB 5k3000 drives and it is rock solid.

Another thing to consider is, for some reason, Samaba on freebsd is complete rear end in terms of performance. Personally I use Macs so I just use AFP/netatalk so I don't run into that problem.

Here's a good post install guide for FreeBSD to set up a ZFS array:
http://zfsguru.com/doc/bsd/setup

Also, stay away from the Green drives, the 5k3000 drives are just as good and don't have the 4k sector headaches. ZFS takes care of pretty much everything (partitioning, read, write, etc) so if you go that way, you want to make sure you present all of your drives as JBOD.

# ¿ Oct 27, 2011 15:53

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Wheelchair Stunts posted:

For the FreeBSD ZFS options, I was wondering if these offer NFS/SMB/CIFS in-kernel like Solaris does? I'm sure that NFS support is but not so sure on CIFS and/or if the kernel version in FreeBSD is compatible with like
code:
zfs set sharesmb=on;bullshit fartbullet

They aren't there, you have to share them manually. I don't use NFS so maybe someone else can chime in on that.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2011 15:12

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

OpenSolaris/Nexenta/OpenIndiana will have no problems with exported ZFS (v28). FreeBSD supports v15, though 9.0RC1 supports v28 too (i'm running 9.0RC1 and imported an OpenIndiana array).

# ¿ Oct 30, 2011 18:47

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

Odette posted:

I have exams this week, my brain is actually not working properly. OKAY. I guess I am in the right thread. Just wanted to make sure.

I don't really care about enclosure/case size. I saw this linked in this thread and thought it was pretty cool. I want something like 8TB capacity (5x 2TB drives in RAID5 + 80GB OS drive?), low power consumption, able to stream 1080p via HDMI output.

I would actually prefer to go the custom route, rather than buying some prebuilt NAS.

It's a pretty lovely time to be building a NAS right now with hard drive prices going up due to the floods in SE Asia.

But an Atom board, with 4 gigs of ram and an nvidia chipset will probably be your best bet if you need HDMI out (and CUDA).

If you want to go ZFS, you're going to want a decent JBOD controller (I use an IBM M1015 flashed to IT mode) and ECC ram (which means no Atom EDIT: unless theres a supermicro board that supports Atom and ECC).

Matt Zerella fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Nov 2, 2011

# ¿ Nov 2, 2011 14:34

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

astr0man posted:

Are there any major drawbacks to using ZFS on Linux vs just running FreeNAS? I'm putting together a microserver based NAS and was planning on running Ubuntu Server 10.04 since I'm a lot more comfortable working in Ubuntu/Debian Linux vs FreeBSD.

You're running it in user mode, not kernel so there's a bunch of overhead.

If you're comfortable with the commandline, it's not that hard to run FreeBSD and set up a ZFS array and the sharing protocol of your choosing through the Ports system.

I know the userland tools of *BSD act differently but the main thing I had to get used to was everything being underneath /usr.

Your other choice is kFreeBSD which will run ZFS natively with the Debian userland/apt packaging system. But it's an older version of ZFS.

Personally I'm running FreeBSD 9.0-RC1 and it hasn't been too big of an adjustment. Play around with them in VMs and see what you like.

(also what else do you plan on running)

EDIT: Just fired up kFreeBSD in a VM. You can install the 8.1 kernel, which has ZFS version 15. Everything else, including apt works exactly like Debian. Heck, I might start using it once it switches to the 9.x kernel. ("apt-get install zfsutils")

Matt Zerella fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Nov 8, 2011

# ¿ Nov 8, 2011 16:32

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

karoshi posted:

http://zfsonlinux.org/ links a repository https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native/+archive/stable for ubuntu that will give you kernel modules for ZFS. I tried it on virtualbox and it read some virtual raid arrays without problems.
I'd say give that a try. But beware, solaris code has been written and tested by a big corporation and shipped in storage products for a some years, BSD code has been integrated from the public release of that code by a bunch of volunteers for a few kernel releases, linux code is an adaption layer (Solaris porting layer (SPL, spl.ko)) and a port of the original code which wont ever be integrated into the linus kernel and probably has less developers than BSD looking at it and has been available for less time than BSD and has seen even less testing.
I might be wrong on some points, I've just been toying with the idea of building a NAS and trying products in VMs.

Yeah, I'm way more inclined to trust FreeBSD/kFreeBSD vs messing around with emulated kernel modules. I honestly think kFreeBSD while a bit immature is a lot nicer in terms of balancing Linux userland with BSD/Solaris ZFS.

Then again I'm running a RC of FreeBSD 9 so i guess i'm playing with fire too.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2011 23:06

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

teamdest posted:

Running an rc of freebsd is like running a stable version of most other operating systems. That said, I run zfs on linux under debian and. Have seen no performance degradation compared against those same drives in a mdadm xfs array or a freebsd zfs array. Speed and stability seem to be the same, though I think the rc of freebsd 9 has a newer zpool version than the linux one.

9 is v28

I didn't know that about RC being almost the same as stable. Thanks for the info.

I haven't really benchmarked speed but there are apparently improvements.

My major problem is I live in an area where there are a TON of access points. It really degrades my wifi performance (my AppleTV with XBMC is fine over a wire). So I guess it might be time to look into a Wireless N router just so I can get off of the crowded 2.4ghz frequency (I've tried channels 1,6, and 11 and it's not much better on any of them, everything I read says to stay away from the other channels as there is overlap).

# ¿ Nov 8, 2011 23:20

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# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 10:39

Matt Zerella: Oct 7, 2002; Norris'es are back baby. It's good again. Awoouu (fox Howl)

The N600 looks nice (dual band, gigabit switch)...but no Tomato support.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2011 01:25

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

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