Help with FreeNAS

T

Tman15

n00b
Joined
Mar 15, 2011
Messages
6
Hi all,

I plan on using FreeNas 0.7.2 on a system that I will be building. I used FreeNas on an older Gigabyte board with 5 SATA2 ports. It worked with no problem. I want to use a board with 7 or 8 SATA2 ports on it. It does not matter if it is AMD or Intel. Just want to keep the price of the board under 135. Can anyone recommend a board that they know will work with FreeNAS that has the number of SATA2 ports that I need?

Thanks
 
There are no chipsets with more than 6 onboard SATA; so that motherboard would most likely use FakeRAID to achieve more ports. Those often have their own colour; so you would see multiple colour SATA connectors. It could work, but generally these are not very good and could give you problems if you do not avoid writing to the last sector on each drive connected to such a FakeRAID controller.

If you current gigabyte board works good for you, then why upgrade? Why not buy a HBA if you need more ports? Intel SASUC8i will work great on FreeNAS and other platforms if you flash it to IT mode firmware. It can connect 8 SATA/300 disks through two mini-sas cables which each split into 4 normal SATA/300 connectors. These cables must be bought separately.
 
Thanks for the fast response. Yes the boards that I am referring to have typically five or six ports, plus one or two others that use a different chipset. I don't have any plans on enabling RAID on the ports. I will be setting the ports to use IDE Mode through BIOS. I intend on using ZFS and a RAIDZ2 with FreeNAS. Are there any boards that have been successful with the different SATA chipset being used with FreeNAS?

The reason for not sticking with the Gigabyte board is that it already is being used for a different purpose and also because I need more hard drives than the five. I was hoping to keep the costs down but I will take a look at the SASUC8i. If there anyone is having success with their boards utlizing two onboard SATA chipsets, do let me know.

Thanks
 
The SASUC8i could take away your problems and allow you to connect 8 HDDs so plenty of room to expand in the future. It could be useful for many years and use it on different systems.

Note that ZFS on FreeNAS 0.7.x doesn't work as good as on more recent platforms (FreeNAS 0.8, FreeBSD 8.2+, ZFSguru, Solaris). Choose the 64-bit version when you can, since otherwise ZFS would be even more crippled.

I would not use FakeRAID ports especially with FreeNAS which appears to provide no protection against FakeRAID metadata corruption. Most motherboards with FakeRAID (gigabyte often has a "gigabyte RAID controller" which is a rebranded JMicron or Silicon Image controller; both FakeRAID) do not have an opportunity to disable the RAID and use the controller as normal HBA.

So the Intel HBA solution might be a good one for the long term, and not that expensive for the number of ports offered; all at full bandwidth.
 
Thanks sub, the information is very helpful. I have tried FreeNAS 0.8 and NexentaStor. I did like the FreeNAS 0.8, but it is still not stable yet. Plus there have been some comments on the FreeNAS forum that describes the build as being flawed even when it gets to a stable build. I am interested in ZFSGuru. I like the fact that it you are using FreeeBSD. I would like to see it when it reaches to the .20 version. Any thoughts on when you think it will reach a stable release date?

Thanks
 
Hmmm, i think you should separate your question into three:

- how stable is the ZFS implementation in the targeted OS?
- how stable is the OS itself?
- how stable is the web-interface frontend?

For both FreeNAS 0.8 and ZFSguru, you could say they are very stable on the first two points, but not on the third. For FreeNAS 0.7.x it would be: 1) not stable 2) stable 3) stable.

The most important is stability of ZFS; you don't want to run a beta-code ZFS build; only use STABLE commercial 'production quality' ZFS releases. FreeNAS 0.8, ZFSguru and FreeBSD 8.2 are all suitable in this regard. This ensures no weird ZFS behavior.

Second you have the OS itself; i consider Solaris and FreeBSD very stable server-class operating systems, so they both succeed in this regard.

Third is the most fluctuating one: the front-end. FreeNAS 0.8 is a complete rewrite from 0.7.x so perhaps a new project baring the same name. That means that they have to rewrite a lot of stuff and current releases will not be as fully-featured. They may also be incompatibilities with future handling, for disk formatting/labeling for example.

ZFSguru also has important limitations that you must be aware of:
- it currently features no authentication; anyone on the LAN can access the GUI. By default non-local IP addresses like the internet are blocked, though.
- it does not allow replacing failed disks via the GUI yet (you can use the CLI of course)
- it lacks some advanced functions (L2ARC/SLOG/LAGG)
- it lacks email notification on pool failure

These limitations should be gone by 0.2.0 when ZFSguru becomes a project mature enough to be considered a viable option to people looking for a ZFS NAS solution. However, if you can live with the current set of limitations and the limited functionality offered, i don't consider the interface itself to be 'unstable'. So you could use it already, considering you take precautions like check the state of your pool now and then and not allow the NAS to be accessed by any unauthorized source.
 
If it's true they store partition information in SQlite then that doesn't really look sexy to me. Such designs could potentially cause problems on the long term, or unexpected behavior in some cases.

I cannot really say anything authoritative about FreeNAS 0.8 though; i haven't reviewed the code, i have only briefly looked at the GUI, etc. But i can say that i trust ZFSguru enough to run on both of my own storage systems (primary and backup), and i do not see any obvious risk over a normal FreeBSD installation. In fact, a GUI could prevent user mistakes which can actually risk your files.

If you're really afraid of losing your data, then invest heavily in real backups. Like a second server that is mostly powered off and only powers on to sync with the main server. Such a setup is what i use. That should provide a formidable protection to your data and give you 'enterprise class' data security.
 
ZFS is a great file system, and a fantastic idea, but it sucks in FreeNAS 7. I had lots of weird issues (I'm using encryption). I would not trust it.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1585374

Instead, use UFS. I tried ZFS on FreeNAS 8, and it was a disaster. It doesn't do anything I hope'd it do (like set up a ZFS array, encryption, dedupe), and it was a mess. I had to go back to FreeNAS.
 
Thanks sub. FreeNAS 0.8 does look good, but I don't trust it right now. I'll give ZFSGuru a go to see how it is.

tonyb. Thanks for your thoughts. I did have good success with FreeNAS 0.72. I was able to get the read/writes around 60MB/s. When I switched to a Intel NIC, it went up more. I did have to do some fine tuning to get it higher. But it was successful. I was working with it for over a month.
 
I am trying out OpenIndiana with Napp-It. When sending large files to ZFS I average around 60MB/s using Windows 7. When Copying from ZFS to Windows 7 I have been hitting around 85MB/s. Definitely acceptable for what I want to do with it. The system I have is a:

GA-8800GA-UD3H board Rev 2.2
8 GB memory
6x5K3000 Hitachi Drives
AMD Athlon II X3 450 Rana 3.2GHz

I do have a couple of questions. First, would I see an improvement somewhere with an additional 4GB of memory added to the setup for a total of 12GB? I currently do not have the pool set with Compression or Dedup. I don't think that I will be enabling it.

Secondly, as sub mentioned in his earlier reply, my board does have two additional Gigabyte(rebranded JMicron or Silicon Image controller) SATA ports. I have an additional 5K3000 drive. If I set the BIOS to use AHCI versus RAID/IDE or if I avoid writing to the last sector of that drive, would that negate the chance of metadata corruption or any other problems?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top