Zacate build for zfs freenas

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D4RK1C3

Gawd
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So after looking into some options for a home nas solution that runs dlna I think I've decide to build a small Zacate machine for zfs freenas setup.

My plan is to digitaly store my bluray collection for network viewing on my laptop, tablet, and ps3.

This is going to be my first zfs setup and I had a few questions.

I've seen some back and forth info about adding different size/mfg drives to a raidz. It shouldn't be a problem now, but if I want to add in the future will I be able to?

If you have done a similar build in the past would you mind if I contacted you on various snags? If yes please say so.

And finally please take a look at what I plan for the build and let me know if you see anything that stands out as wrong.

ASUS E35M1-M PRO
Antec BP550
Kingston 4GB
LIAN LI PC-V351B
2x WD 2TB HD's

Thanks, Really looking forward to starting this.

edit - changed to a microatx build for hdmi and usb3.0 on mb
 
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500w PSU for a Zacate is a bit overkill, Look into an HP microserver instead, smaller and faster and great price.
 
My understanding is that you buy Zacate APUs for their graphics performance. I'm using one for my bedroom HTPC and can attest to the fact that CPU performance is pretty abysmal. You might want to just look into some Atom-based solutions, since GPU performance is useless on a (probably headless) NAS. They (Atoms) also run a lot cooler in my experience.

Edit: Also, what he said about the PSU. With only two HDDs (even with more, really) you'll do fine with a pico PSU. Love those little things.
 
I built a zacate file server (2008R2) when it first came out. The zacate is a great platform for a file server.

- zacate supports 8GB DDR3 RAM where ATOM only can do 4GB DDR2
- zacate supports 6x SATA6gbps where ATOM only has 4x SATA3gbps
- zacate has more cpu power over atom
- atom has a power hungry northbridge

I use the same E35M1 pro motherboard with 4x 2TB drives in windows raid5, and 2x 1TB drives in windows raid1. Works fantastic, great hd performance and network transfer speeds.
 
af22 said:
I built a zacate file server (2008R2) when it first came out. The zacate is a great platform for a file server.

- zacate supports 8GB DDR3 RAM where ATOM only can do 4GB DDR2
- zacate supports 6x SATA6gbps where ATOM only has 4x SATA3gbps
- zacate has more cpu power over atom
- atom has a power hungry northbridge

I use the same E35M1 pro motherboard with 4x 2TB drives in windows raid5, and 2x 1TB drives in windows raid1. Works fantastic, great hd performance and network transfer speeds.
Click to expand...

Thanks I may need to look at doing a windows box as it has come to my attention that freenas 8 doesn't have a dlna server. It wont until 8.1 is released and 8.0.1 needs to be released before that. I have also read that freenas 7 doesn't work well on the zacate platform.
 
D4RK1C3 said:
Thanks I may need to look at doing a windows box as it has come to my attention that freenas 8 doesn't have a dlna server. It wont until 8.1 is released and 8.0.1 needs to be released before that. I have also read that freenas 7 doesn't work well on the zacate platform.
Click to expand...

DNLA is great for sharing on a Home Server. However, if you need need to do transcoding, the zacate will not do anything more than SD, or playback formats supported by your HTPC or Media player box.
 
MrSmegzabush said:
DNLA is great for sharing on a Home Server. However, if you need need to do transcoding, the zacate will not do anything more than SD, or playback formats supported by your HTPC or Media player box.
Click to expand...

Yeah I was doing some testing last night with windows based ps3mediaserver (Since I couldn't get windows7 media sharing to transcode dts audio)

I may have to remux my mkv's to vob's and serve them since the ps3 can apparently handle dts audio fine on a bluray disc, but heaven forbid as raw data.

It's not my idea situation. I defiantly don't want to build a box that's going to run hot and heavy with electricity, but I wanted to keep my media files in the best condition. Fortunately whenever I choose to stop using the ps3 as my medium I can redo my bluray library to be the way I want.
 
I don't know if you already bought the zacate board, but I'd either switch to a regular AMD CPU or an Intel Sandy Bridge CPU, both will have a lot more processing power and use little if any more than the zacate at idle, maybe even less. I'd imagine that ZFS will use some CPU. I briefly tested Freenas, unRAID, and others.

My goal was building 2 PCs for a SageTV server and file server that use less idle power than my current WHS v1 SageTV Q6600 Asus mATX board, about 85-90W.

I just built a file server using a Sempron 140, Asus M4A785-M board, 2x1GB RAM, 6 Samsung 2TB hard drives, Seasonic 300ET Bronze PSU, Intel pro1000 NIC (2W), Lubuntu mdadm RAID5 on a 16GB USB drive (8GB would do). The CPU unlocks to a dual core (not all unlock though) and uses the same power in dual core mode as it does in single core mode. I have undervolted the BIOS settings based on what I got running KStat10. Tweaked it idles on the desktop at 64W, drives spun down at 43W. I think a MSI board would use less power based on Harwareluxx (German site) reviews. Max power consumption peaks during startup is about 125W very briefly when the 6 drives first spin up during post. The default Lubuntu "screen saver" uses an additional 7W, D'OH. Love the customized Conky panel, it shows the entire system at a glance.

I also have a i3-2100 on an Intel DH61WW board (4 SATA ports), running a 2.5" WD drive, 2x4GB RAM, older 330W Seasonic (not as efficient). It idles in Vista 64 at 24W, max during boot is 55W. This CPU will be substantially faster than a Zactate if you want to do any transcoding, probably uses less power than the Zacate on Asus in idle mode. With a Picopsu it would probably idle in the 15-18W range. Another advantage to this setup, it has a good onboard Intel NIC. Disadvantage, crappy ports, doesn't matter for my usage though.

Power measured with KillaWatt, "at the wall".

i3-2100 - http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-2100+@+3.10GHz

AMD 4400E - http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+II+X2+4400e

E-350 - http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=AMD+E-350

The Asus E35M1-M Pro power usage listed here looks good, they are using a PicoPSU.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1167-page5.html

Sample of Hardwareluxx info...
http://translate.google.com/transla...ore&hl=en&rlz=1C1CHKZ_enUS440US440&prmd=imvns
 
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The E-350 is plenty for a pure file server, but it will not handle transcoding well. If the file server you are planning to build will only service other PCs, including HTPCs, you are golden, but if you plan to run a media server off of the file server, the E-350 will likely bottleneck.

What formats do you plan to store on your file server? Your laptop should be happy with anything, but will the file server hold onto formats which your tablet and PS3 are able to play natively? Will format conversions be required?

It it my understanding that once a Raid-Z array is created, it must be completely rebuilt if you wish to add an additional drive. This can be done, but it can be a headache and requires an interim location to store all of your data. (You can always add a second array, but you will lose some space due to extra parity data overhead.)

ZFS uses a lot of RAM, and RAM is cheap. Go with 8GB over 4GB. (8GB is recommended for ZFS.)

I use:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231311

Also, while the Realtek 8111E (NIC) is supported by FreeBSD, it definitely is more susceptible to issues compared to the Intel NICs. NICs can also be a bottleneck in file servers, and the Intel NICs (designed for servers and workstations) are faster and more consistent than the on-board Realtek NICs.

The Intel CT series is a very common (and cheap) suggestion for FreeBSD file servers:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106033
 
Thanks for all the input.

I think I'm going to stick with the e-350 in case I decide to use it as a htpc in the future instead of a file server. If there's not enough processor power to hand the raidz then I could use a pcie raid controller. However I'm not sure if a pcie 1x card can support full bandwidth to 2x sata3 drives. Does anyone have input on this?

In terms of file usage. It will be serving my windows pc as well as my ps3. My original intention was to keep all my media as it stood off the disk in an mkv container. My transcoding testing I've done with my pc has shown me that this is probably not ideal. From that point I began remuxing some of my files with mkv2vob and testing. My processor utilization droped significantly between the original file and the remuxed file.

This isn't my ideal way of keeping my media, but I am comfortable with redoing my media files in the future the way I like once the ps3 isn't my primary media player.

Thanks
 
TESLA said:
Also, while the Realtek 8111E (NIC) is supported by FreeBSD, it definitely is more susceptible to issues compared to the Intel NICs. NICs can also be a bottleneck in file servers, and the Intel NICs (designed for servers and workstations) are faster and more consistent than the on-board Realtek NICs.

The Intel CT series is a very common (and cheap) suggestion for FreeBSD file servers:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106033
Click to expand...

I did some extensive testing with several different NICs and a couple different switches here in 2008. My onboard Realteks seemed to always be fast one way and dog slow the other way. Recent testing with the Lubuntu server showed some oddities where the Realtek 8111C (06/2011 dated driver, Win7) speed would cycle after a short time (30MB/s), then pick up again later (65MB/s) using Samba, strange. I need to try FTP, it was a lot faster as I recall. A PCI bus Realtek (8169?) wasn't too bad, fairly consistent, but slower than the Intel NICs. My Intel NICs are older than the one you show, different model, might use more power than a newer one, they are consistent. I have the older style plainer looking heatsinks on my GSkill "Sniper". I have it undervolted to 1.4V set to 9-9-9-24-1T in the BIOS, it ran w/o errors memtest for 5 hours, good enough for me. Other than shutting off unused devices, making sure power saving options were set, this is the only BIOS change I made on the little Intel board with the i3-2100.

This was my LAN testing, drives made the biggest difference, but now most drives should be at least this fast I'd think. See post 16 &17 for the most information.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1280399

I looked long and hard at the e-350 series boards too, $125 for a board with CPU is not bad, I am actually an AMD guy at heart. It will likely use less power at load than the i3-2100, but how about this combo?
Intel DH61WW $70 (newegg) and Intel Pentium Gxxx from $57 & up (newegg), probably not that much different than my $99 i3-2100.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...eactivatedMark=False&Order=PRICE&PageSize=100

This is some info I used from Hardwareluxx for the i3-2100. It is in-line with what I see with a lower efficiency PSU @24W idle, 55W max on boot. I don't think I've run prime on it yet for a good load power usage. Search there for some e-350 info too, gotta be some there. Oops, the E-350 linked info is at the top of the link below. Warning: they like MSI boards there because they generally use less power.

http://translate.google.com/transla...CHKZ_enUS440US440&biw=1680&bih=925&prmd=imvns
 
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I have my box together now running freenas 7. I did the custom install of the network driver as it is not natively supported.

The only issue I'm having now is that freenas doesn't see my two hard drives. Not sure why as I've seen people using the wd green's in this setup.
 
Installed freenas 8 and it saw my hard drives. got a raidz configured without problem and did some writes and reads to it. So I know all my hardware is good.

Also when I have a sata optical drive plugged into the motherboard freenas 7 sees it fine. So I know freenas 7 can use the mb's sata controller.

I would use freenas 8, but it doesn't have upnp support until 2 release's from now.
 
fixed for freenas 7.2

Apparently 7.2 won't handle sata 3. I set max speed in bios to sata 2, but still had to use the physical jumper on the drives. I will begin testing read/write speeds tomorrow or the day after.
 
I have some numbers to share at this time. Testing was done on a windows 7 pc with a gig connection to a netgear wndr3700 to the nas. Testing was done on a cifs mapped drive with performance test by passmark.

Freenas Version - Config - Read - Write
8 - One Hd ufs (ada0) - 69.9MB/sec - 72.8MB/sec
8 - One Hd ufs (ada1) - 69.9MB/sec - 69MB/sec
8 - Two drive zfs stripe - 45MB/sec - 68.9MB/sec
8 - Two drive zfs stripe (no compression) - 48.6MB/sec - 71.4MB/sec
8 - Two drive zfs stripe (4k blocks) - 49.2MB/sec - 63.3MB/sec
8 - Two drive zfs stripe (4k blocks) (no compression) - 51MB/sec - 70.5MB/sec
8 - Two drive ufs stripe - 67.5MB/sec - 68.8MB/sec
7.2 - Two drive zfs stripe - 6.6MB/sec - 62.3MB/sec
7.2 - Two drive software raid0 - 87.9MB/sec - 67.3MB/sec

I should have some more numbers tonight, but the most alerting thing is the difference between zfs on bsd7 vs bsd8.

I am also looking at some hardware raid controllers for a 2 drive raid0 sata3, but am having trouble finding one that is compatible with both bsd7 and 8. So if you know of one that isn't going to break the bank please let me know.
 
For you E-350 users out there, what kind of power consumption are you seeing on your file servers? My little N270 single core Atom media server is getting a little long in the tooth, and I'm getting tempted to build a new one with four 3TB drives now that they're coming down to reasonable prices.

It's going to be really hard to come anywhere close to the power consumption on this little guy though. How many watts does the E-350 complete system eat? I know some chipsets use more than others...
 
My build:
amd e350
2 2tb wd black hd's
4gb usb flash drive
2 120mm fans
1 80mm fan
530watt psu

Os:
freenas 7.2 (freebsd)
software raid 0
Running CIFS and PS3 media server

wall voltage around 120.4-120.6

off - .06 amps - 7.23 watts
booting - .43 amps - 51.815 watts
watching media - .44 amps - 53.02 watts

Anything else just let me know
 
If you would like an idea of just the board itself I can remove the other components and then add them back in one by one.
 
I’m running FreeNAS [0.7.2 Sabanda (revision 7S-6983)] on a media server using an ASUS E35M1-M PRO mobo - no raid.

I am using just two hard drives right now (waiting for black Friday sales), an old Hitachi 250g and a newer SAMSUNG F4EG HD155UI 1.5TB.

I get roughly the same amount of watts booting (51watts) that D4RK1C3 gets, but it drops quickly to 40, then 38, and finally 32 watts when idle.

I see no more than 33 watts when watching two streams, one was a 1080i and the other was a 720p TV show.

Also when I turn off the media server it uses 0.1 watts, not the 7.23 watts that his system uses.

I think the power supply may be the reason for the difference between him and my energy use. I use an older model Antec EA380 watt 80+ power supply.
 
I was thinking that myself and was going to try a different psu once I dug it up.

warbird. Do you know of any pcie2 raid controllers that work in both bsd7 and 8? I would hate to buy one then move to freenas8.1 on release to not be able to use the controller.
 
D4RK1C3 said:
If you would like an idea of just the board itself I can remove the other components and then add them back in one by one.
Click to expand...

No need to trouble yourself that far. I was just looking for a ballpark which you've already provided. Appreciate the offer though.

Also when I turn off the media server it uses 0.1 watts, not the 7.23 watts that his system uses.

I think the power supply may be the reason for the difference between him and my energy use. I use an older model Antec EA380 watt 80+ power supply.
Click to expand...

Interesting. I'm a huge fan of Pico PSUs so I'd likely be using one of the 150W models. They're extremely efficient. I think that would be enough for an E350 board and four 3TB drives.
 
So I am now done with the build in the terms that I have my media the way I want it being hosted on my nas available as a dlna server. I wanted to provide some conclusions and some struggles I had along the way.

1. The onboard realtek nic is not supported out of the box in freenas 7 or 8. Found a guide and driver online to solve this. Very nice guide as it has a 32 and 64 bit drivers.

2. My current read/write speeds are not as fast as I expected, I think that if I were to use a hardware raid or 3 drives in a zfs on freenas 8 it would be better. My current speeds are ~88MB/sec read and ~67MB/sec write. These are more than fine for my planned uses so I am fine with it. When writing to the drive at the ~67MB/sec my cpu utilization is around 50-60% on both cores. I would conclude that my speeds are limited by the controller or the design of the software raid.

3. Freenas 8's zfs is sh*t tons better than Freenas 7.2's. Not sure why, but its very noticeable. A two drive zfs stripe is slower than a two drive software raid0 on both os's. I assume the speeds would do better with more than two drives and the use of a raidz.

4. Freenas 7.2 does NOT support sata 3. Limiting my sata speed in bios to 3.0Gbps still didn't let Freenas 7.2 see my drives. I had to set the jumper on the dives to limit it and then all was well.

5. The upnp server built into Freenas 7.2 is very unstable and seems very hard to keep working. This is why I decided to move to ps3mediaserver (PMS). The installation of this requires a variety of other packages. A guide is here. Installation of all this requires you to do a full install of freenas so you have enough drive space. The embedded install makes a very small partition.

6. The latest version of PMS takes forever to become available to my ps3. I think it has something to do with the amount of time between it sending alive broadcasts. A lot of what I read said this wasn't the case. Don't really care though because I just installed a previous version of PMS and it works great. By the way it sends alive broadcasts every 10 seconds instead of every 180 seconds.

7. I wanted to have my media files in a form that did not require transcoding for my PS3 and not re-encode the video. Wanted to save my cpu power for software raid and keep lower power consumption. I spent alot of time pulling blu rays to mkv files, and trying to use various programs to get it to be usable on the ps3. The most promising was a program called mkv2vob. It was supposed to take my mkv, demux it, convert the dts audio to ac3, remux it back together, and put it in a ps3 compatible container. This program gave me video artifacts all over the place and seems to be a dead project.

8. My final solution for my media was to rip my blu ray to my computer, demux the dts audio track out of the m2ts file, convert it to ac3, remux my orignal m2ts file with adding my new ac3 track. I moved the ac3 track up to the very first ac3 track just below the dts track. When I play my media on my computer or other devices that can decode dts it uses that track, but the ps3 uses the first ac3 track by default completely skipping the dts track. I know you can choose what audio track to play in the ps3 menu, but it is nice to have it automatically use my new ac3 track.

9. There are a few things that are still in my head about the project; getting PMS to work on freenas 8 (didn't even try yet); using a hardware raid controller to see the effect on read/write speeds; using a third 2tb drive in my soft raid stripe to see the effect on read/write speeds; using a better quality psu to see the effect on my power consumption; and getting subtitles in my m2ts files (don't even know if this is possible).

Overall I am satisfied.
 
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My satisfaction ran out. I have now shifted away from freenas and installed ubuntu server w/ ssh and samba. Got samba configured then installed ps3 media server on it. I took my 2 hard drives and set up some raid partitions on them data and swap then left boot on just one of them.

Read/writes times are close to before. The big difference is that whatever was stopping my m-search requests with freenas is no longer an issue and the media server is instantly available to my ps3.

There are a couple things floating around in my mind right now. I was wondering if there is a way to have ubuntu server go into standby after x minutes of inactivity. Which I'm sure is possible. The other thing is finding a way for my ps3 to send a wake on lan trigger, or for my router to recognize a m-search packet from my trips and then send a wake on lan trigger.

I haven't started looking into these but I'm thinking ddwrt may be able to do something with a custom script.

If you have any ideas please let me know.
 
Tonight I have made some advancements with the power config I want to use.

I've installed powernap on the server, and set it to monitor port 22(ssh), 5001(upnp), and 445(microsoft sharing). If there are isn't traffic on those ports for 300 seconds the system will issue pm-suspend command and turn off.

On the windows side I can use a little utility called WOL-Magic Packet Sender to wake up the server when needed.

I just now need to find a way to trigger the event from the ps3 and I'll have the setup working like I want.
 
I seem to be talking to myself a lot here. But I have finished the entirety of the setup. My nas hosts pms. It will auto sleep if not is use for 5 minutes. I can send a wake on lan to it from my pc to hit its content. I can send a wake on lan to it from my router by going to 192.168.1.1:9999 in my ps3 browser. From ps3 off to watching a movie off of the nas is less than a minute and a half.

I'm going to be buying a small ssd hard drive to host my operating system on rather than it being on the data drives, and maybe a simple raid card. So when I redo the install I plan to make a guide and post it here.

I ended up learning a lot of good stuff by taking on this project that I had little knowledge of beforehand, and it was a ton of fun. With the end result being exactly what I envisioned.

Thanks for those that had input and suggestions.
 
D4RK1C3 said:
I can send a wake on lan to it from my router by going to 192.168.1.1:9999 in my ps3 browser. From ps3 off to watching a movie off of the nas is less than a minute and a half.
Click to expand...
Thats an interesting way to WOL a server from a PS3 but still sounds like an aweful lot of trouble to wake a server that uses very little power to begin with.
 
D4RK1C3 said:
I have some numbers to share at this time. Testing was done on a windows 7 pc with a gig connection to a netgear wndr3700 to the nas. Testing was done on a cifs mapped drive with performance test by passmark.

Freenas Version - Config - Read - Write
8 - One Hd ufs (ada0) - 69.9MB/sec - 72.8MB/sec
8 - One Hd ufs (ada1) - 69.9MB/sec - 69MB/sec
8 - Two drive zfs stripe - 45MB/sec - 68.9MB/sec
8 - Two drive zfs stripe (no compression) - 48.6MB/sec - 71.4MB/sec
8 - Two drive zfs stripe (4k blocks) - 49.2MB/sec - 63.3MB/sec
8 - Two drive zfs stripe (4k blocks) (no compression) - 51MB/sec - 70.5MB/sec
8 - Two drive ufs stripe - 67.5MB/sec - 68.8MB/sec
7.2 - Two drive zfs stripe - 6.6MB/sec - 62.3MB/sec
7.2 - Two drive software raid0 - 87.9MB/sec - 67.3MB/sec

I should have some more numbers tonight, but the most alerting thing is the difference between zfs on bsd7 vs bsd8.

I am also looking at some hardware raid controllers for a 2 drive raid0 sata3, but am having trouble finding one that is compatible with both bsd7 and 8. So if you know of one that isn't going to break the bank please let me know.
Click to expand...

What drive is on your windows 7 PC

Those speeds look pretty slow.
 
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