FreeNAS Server

[Avacado]

Waiting on some components. Open air chassis utilizing a spare case I had lying around. I have not had much networking experience as of late so this should be fun. Will be using FreeNAS. I had these 4 HDD's laying around that were going to go into the 4 Horsemen build. Figured I might as well put them to use as the wife has been nagging for storage space on the network. 

 

MOBO - ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 LGA 1366 (X58 Chipset)

CPU - Xeon X5687

RAM - Cheap-o Chinese PC3-12800 (11-11-11) 3x4GB sticks

GPU - GTX 750Ti

OS - Kingston 128GB SATA SSD

Storage - 4x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf HDD's

PSU - EVGA G+ 1000w

OS - FreeNAS

 

Edited January 26, 2022 by Avacado

[The Pook]

had to RMA one of the <1 year old Iron Wolf Pro drives in my NAS and got back a drive that failed <week later, hopefully you have better luck with your drives 

[Avacado]

  On 21/01/2022 at 20:56, The Pook said:

had to RMA one of the <1 year old Iron Wolf Pro drives in my NAS and got back a drive that failed <week later, hopefully you have better luck with your drives 

Expand  

Well that is unfortunate. I would go pure SSD if I didn't already have the drives. They still aren't cheap.

[Avacado]

So the MOBO/RAM and both CPU's I purchased for this board were DOA. They were from a seller on OCN who I knew and surprised me. No harm no foul, but I am on the hunt for another board/cpu/ram combo. I will most likely pick up a second EVGA Nforce 790i and use one of the many CPU's I have for the LGA 775 platform. I love the idea of old tech still being able to perform in 2022. 

 

Or I will use one of the extra z390/9900k builds I have laying around. I will have to do maintenance on the one in the office and switch it out as it is a bad bin and can't do more than 5.0GHz. Though they are both delidded, the one in the dungeon right now can do 5.3GHz and it would be wasted on a NAS. Though it would probably be the fastest NAS on the planet. 

Edited January 26, 2022 by Avacado

[The Pook]

if you decide to go more modern, I got stuck with a Z590 Gigabyte Aorus Pro AX when I bought my GPU. I've been trying to sell it locally but no bites yet 

[EHW Ai]

  On 26/01/2022 at 15:58, Avacado said:

So the MOBO/RAM and both CPU's I purchased for this board were DOA. They were from a seller on OCN who I knew and surprised me. No harm no foul, but I am on the hunt for another board/cpu/ram combo. I will most likely pick up a second EVGA Nforce 790i and use one of the many CPU's I have for the LGA 775 platform. I love the idea of old tech still being able to perform in 2022. 

 

Or I will use one of the extra z390/9900k builds I have laying around. I will have to do maintenance on the one in the office and switch it out as it is a bad bin and can't do more than 5.0GHz. Though they are both delidded, the one in the dungeon right now can do 5.3GHz and it would be wasted on a NAS. Though it would probably be the fastest NAS on the planet. 

Expand  

 

Make it a NAS and Plex server. Think that's what I'm going to do with my old z390/9900k.  I have an Supermicro X9SRH-7F-B LGA2011, 6-8 sticks of Samsung DDR3-1600 16GB ECC and a Xeon E5-1650 also in storage that's just collecting dust, along with at least 15 if not 20 Western Digital Red WD30EFRX 3TB's. My original plan was a Freenas ZFS server that never panned out. 

[Avacado]

2nd LGA 775 board from ebay was a dud (Dead USB). I got pissed off and threw the delidded 9900k in there. It is up and running. You are looking at one fast ass NAS.

 

[ArchStanton]

  On 03/02/2022 at 03:35, Avacado said:

You are looking at one fast ass NAS.

Expand  

With color coordinated RAM no less .

[SamsTechStuff]

Nice setup there - while a 775 build would technically have worked I would imagine some tasks would suffer in terms of performance on that platform.

 

I finally went back to a TrueNAS server myself. Upgrading to the latest ESX 7.x instance for my homelab will result in my controllers not working. My TrueNAS server is setup mostly for sharing an SSD array to ESX but may use it for certain types of other storage. 

[Avacado]

Going to update this thread to see if any of the big brain networking folks can help me out. I really messed this up and I would like to not lose all of my data.

 

Original thread HERE

 

I swapped MOBO's on the NAS and screwed everything up. The good news is that I was able to import the share. The bad news is I can't access it properly from explorer. Any Free/True NAS guru's that could lend a hand?

 

 

[ENTERPRISE]

  On 02/08/2022 at 11:49, Avacado said:

Going to update this thread to see if any of the big brain networking folks can help me out. I really messed this up and I would like to not lose all of my data.

 

Original thread HERE

 

I swapped MOBO's on the NAS and screwed everything up. The good news is that I was able to import the share. The bad news is I can't access it properly from explorer. Any Free/True NAS guru's that could lend a hand?

 

 

Expand  

So you have imported the Pools, are the SMB shares still correctly setup in TrueNas ?

 

When you say you cannot access the shares, what issues are you having?

[Avacado]

  On 02/08/2022 at 20:09, ENTERPRISE said:

So you have imported the Pools, are the SMB shares still correctly setup in TrueNas ?

 

When you say you cannot access the shares, what issues are you having?

Expand  

So I had a hunch. Recently I stripped down the streaming rig OS. SUPER THIN. So I re-installed windows and everything works again magically. No idea what happened. Just glad it's fixed. 

[Fluxmaven]

Sounds like just removing and reconnecting the share on Windows would have fixed it but a whole OS re-install never hurts 

 

I love the comical overkill of the i9 mixed with the mediocrity of the onboard 1G NIC. 

[Avacado]

  On 02/08/2022 at 22:48, Fluxmaven said:

Sounds like just removing and reconnecting the share on Windows would have fixed it but a whole OS re-install never hurts 

 

I love the comical overkill of the i9 mixed with the mediocrity of the onboard 1G NIC. 

Expand  

Well, I did try to install an LGA 1700 Strix with a 12100f, but the FreeNAS software doesn't work on the 2.5GB NIC

[Fluxmaven]

I must have just gotten lucky. My 2.5g NIC and LSI HBA card both worked flawlessly right out the gate. I'm on TrueNAS 13 though.

[ENTERPRISE]

What I have learned with pfsense and TrueNas when it comes to NIC's...Intel Intel and more Intel. Best support coverage and much of the time they "just work". 

[Avacado]

  On 03/08/2022 at 02:31, Fluxmaven said:

I must have just gotten lucky. My 2.5g NIC and LSI HBA card both worked flawlessly right out the gate. I'm on TrueNAS 13 though.

Expand  

Yea, I'm thinking of backing up and updating the software. I won't be swapping tech out though. I don't think I would benefit from a 2.5GBe NIC anyways. Kind of limited with the HDDs. 

  On 03/08/2022 at 21:41, ENTERPRISE said:

What I have learned with pfsense and TrueNas when it comes to NIC's...Intel Intel and more Intel. Best support coverage and much of the time they "just work". 

Expand  

Yea. I'm running Intel, but damn if it didn't give me a heart attack. 

Edited August 3, 2022 by Avacado

[ENTERPRISE]

  On 03/08/2022 at 21:59, Avacado said:

Yea, I'm thinking of backing up and updating the software. I won't be swapping tech out though. I don't think I would benefit from a 2.5GBe NIC anyways. Kind of limited with the HDDs. 

Yea. I'm running Intel, but damn if it didn't give me a heart attack. 

Expand  

A heart attack? 

 

Im running the Intel X540-T2, cheap 10gbe NIC. Do I need 10gbe ? Nope....but I can, so I will. This is the ethos of an enthusiast lol.

[Avacado]

  On 04/08/2022 at 16:38, ENTERPRISE said:

A heart attack? 

 

Im running the Intel X540-T2, cheap 10gbe NIC. Do I need 10gbe ? Nope....but I can, so I will. This is the ethos of an enthusiast lol.

Expand  

Yea, I have no idea. In my hours of searching google for an answer, I kept reading that in order to recover the data, I had to run a similar NIC to the one previously. Which would explain why it failed to connect to the NAS when I tried with the 2.5GBe Strix. If SSD's ever get to the point where I can buy volume for a decent price, I will for sure upgrade off 1GB NIC. 

[ENTERPRISE]

  On 04/08/2022 at 17:35, Avacado said:

Yea, I have no idea. In my hours of searching google for an answer, I kept reading that in order to recover the data, I had to run a similar NIC to the one previously. Which would explain why it failed to connect to the NAS when I tried with the 2.5GBe Strix. If SSD's ever get to the point where I can buy volume for a decent price, I will for sure upgrade off 1GB NIC. 

Expand  

How does the data recovery depend on the NIC used ? Never heard of that sort of dependency before .

[Avacado]

  On 04/08/2022 at 18:45, ENTERPRISE said:

How does the data recovery depend on the NIC used ? Never heard of that sort of dependency before .

Expand  

I don't know the exact mechanics of it, but after installation of the NAS OS, if you go to operate it on a NIC that is not similar, you can't connect to the drive no matter what you do. 

[Diffident]

  On 04/08/2022 at 21:11, Avacado said:

I don't know the exact mechanics of it, but after installation of the NAS OS, if you go to operate it on a NIC that is not similar, you can't connect to the drive no matter what you do. 

Expand  

Wait.....What???   That doesn't make any sense.   Even if you are using encryption, it wouldn't be tied to the NIC.

[Fluxmaven]

I think there might be some confusion on what's going on when swapping boards, NICs, etc... All the actual data in ZFS is contained within the drives themselves. When you say "can't connect to the drive" I think you are referring to your SMB share that you have mapped in Windows. Breaking the share doesn't harm the actual data. If you go from a board with one kind of network controller to another, you would need to reconfigure your settings because the underlying device name changes ("em0" -> "igb0" for example), but the data will still be there.

 

Also, Gigabit is fully saturated at 125MB/s. Even spinning rust can manage more than that in ZFS. 

I tested this myself by transferring the same folder with 31GB of video files across two different NICs to my NAS. Over gig it averaged around 110-115MB/s. Over 2.5G it was 280-285MB/s. 

 

At the end of the day, you have it up and running and it seems to meet your needs currently. So there's no big rush to change anything, I just like giving you a hard time 

[Avacado]

  On 04/08/2022 at 23:19, Fluxmaven said:

I think there might be some confusion on what's going on when swapping boards, NICs, etc... All the actual data in ZFS is contained within the drives themselves. When you say "can't connect to the drive" I think you are referring to your SMB share that you have mapped in Windows. Breaking the share doesn't harm the actual data. If you go from a board with one kind of network controller to another, you would need to reconfigure your settings because the underlying device name changes ("em0" -> "igb0" for example), but the data will still be there.

 

Also, Gigabit is fully saturated at 125MB/s. Even spinning rust can manage more than that in ZFS. 

I tested this myself by transferring the same folder with 31GB of video files across two different NICs to my NAS. Over gig it averaged around 110-115MB/s. Over 2.5G it was 280-285MB/s. 

 

At the end of the day, you have it up and running and it seems to meet your needs currently. So there's no big rush to change anything, I just like giving you a hard time 

Expand  

That's it. Perhaps I just couldn't figure out the SMB shares (em0 to igb0). Honestly, I don't have a clue about this stuff. Either way, I don't mind waiting the extra few seconds for transfers. I'm old and nothing I place on the NAS is usually more than a few hundred MB's. I do appreciate you all chiming in. It's a total new experience for me. OCing, sure, building, anything. NAS, total idiot. 

 

I do plan on someday making a NAS out of SSD's and when I do, I surely won't be using gigabit ethernet. At least I know where to come ask for help. 

Edited August 4, 2022 by Avacado

[Fluxmaven]

  On 04/08/2022 at 23:33, Avacado said:

That's it. Perhaps I just couldn't figure out the SMB shares (em0 to igb0). Honestly, I don't have a clue about this stuff. Either way, I don't mind waiting the extra few seconds for transfers. I'm old and nothing I place on the NAS is usually more than a few hundred MB's. I do appreciate you all chiming in. It's a total new experience for me. OCing, sure, building, anything. NAS, total idiot. 

 

I do plan on someday making a NAS out of SSD's and when I do, I surely won't be using gigabit ethernet. At least I know where to come ask for help. 

Expand  

Always willing to help brother. I'm actually still figuring out the specifics of TrueNAS/FreeNAS myself. I'm more used to larger enterprise SAN setups from my days working in IT.