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CougTek said:
Does anyone here have any experience with Open Media Vault and if yes, how would you compare it to Openfiler? It seems to have even more features than Openfiler. I don't know about the file transfer performance. The user interface looks better to me.
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I would like to know this also. My OpenFiler version is EOL and I can't update it without a reinstall. I may go back through to reassess NAS OSes to find one I like. I may give FreeNAS a second try to see how it performs again, but as Mercutio suggested the Samba is sub-par, so this might be a blocker for me.
 
I'm studying building a FreeNas with my old WHS hardware. Intel E3300 64-bit dual core CPU. I will have 4GB RAM (most the M/B supports). I have two 1TB HDDs and one 2TB (advanced format WD EADS) hard drive in the machine. Plan on installing FreeNas to an 8GB CF card attached to an SATA adapter.

It's just for home use....backing up data and maybe creating some shares. Perhaps pooling all my data there sometime in the future.

How do you guys recommend I configure it? Do I have enough RAM for good performance with ZFS? What I'm reading suggests maybe not. Would you use ZFS for UFS in my situation? I would like to use some type of software RAID, maybe RAID 1 or something higher. Appreciate your feedback. Also if you think something else would be better than FreeNas, let me know!
 
You'd be better off with more RAM, but it's not really the end of the world if you don't have it. You'll just wait a little longer for a ZFS-shared folder to populate in Windows Explorer, and copies of little tiny files by the thousand will be a bit slower.
 
Thanks. No worries then.

Given the 2x 1TB Samsung & 1x 2TB WD20EADS drive I have, do you guys recommend some type of RAID configuration with ZFS? Note the O/S will be running of a CF card.
 
I did not find the WD EADS drives usable with ZFS on FreeNAS. In fact I spent quite a while playing with those and I really never found any array configuration that worked right with "green" drives. Instead, I have 24 of them (yes, 24 WD drives. Me. I know. In my defense I did not pay for them) working on a Windows Server machine that has Drive Bender installed. Drive Bender allows the disks to exist in a non-array quasi-JBOD that I'm using exclusively for near-line backup. It DOES work with any version of Windows, though the UI is kind of a pain in the ass. Windows 8 and Server 2012 support Storage Spaces which is a sort of similarly flexible storage option that I haven't messed with yet because I am lazy.

FreeNAS docs suggest setting up zPools in groups of five drives. You COULD do a baby RAID5 or zPool with those three drives if your EADS somehow doesn't drop from the pool all the damned time, but you'd only get 2TB of space out of it and that's a little weak. Instead, I'd suggest hunting down another Samsung 1TB drive. You can set the 2TB drive aside for use in an external enclosure or some sort of building material.
 
Mercutio said:
I did not find the WD EADS drives usable with ZFS on FreeNAS. In fact I spent quite a while playing with those and I really never found any array configuration that worked right with "green" drives. Instead, I have 24 of them (yes, 24 WD drives. Me. I know. In my defense I did not pay for them) working on a Windows Server machine that has Drive Bender installed. Drive Bender allows the disks to exist in a non-array quasi-JBOD that I'm using exclusively for near-line backup. It DOES work with any version of Windows, though the UI is kind of a pain in the ass. Windows 8 and Server 2012 support Storage Spaces which is a sort of similarly flexible storage option that I haven't messed with yet because I am lazy.

FreeNAS docs suggest setting up zPools in groups of five drives. You COULD do a baby RAID5 or zPool with those three drives if your EADS somehow doesn't drop from the pool all the damned time, but you'd only get 2TB of space out of it and that's a little weak. Instead, I'd suggest hunting down another Samsung 1TB drive. You can set the 2TB drive aside for use in an external enclosure or some sort of building material.
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I'm doing software RAID-1 in my Win7 Desktop (Dynamic Disk Mirror) so I actually do have an extra Samsung 1TB drive. I will have to think about that. Thanks.
 
Hmmm. Actually I could use the 2TB WD as a boot drive in my main machine and have 4x 1TB Samsungs in my FreeNas. What kind of good RAID mojo could I achieve with that?

BTW: THE WD Drive is a WD20EARS NOT EADS. Is compatibility any better with that one?
 
With 4 drives, if you want to focus on capacity with some redundancy RAID-5 is the way to go (3TB usable).

If you want more speed and still redundancy you can go RAID-10 (2TB usable)

If you just want speed you can go RAID-0 (4TB usable, if any drive dies you lose all your data)
 
Correction, my boot drive is a 64GB SSD. The 2TB WD would be a data drive. Been so long that I mess with this stuff that I forget what I have lol.
 
Clocker said:
I think RAID 1-0 would do the trick for me. Easy enough to setup in FreeNas?
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I believe so. However, I did find their menu systems a little over-complicated in the past, but it looks like a bunch has changed since I last played with FreeNAS.
 
My WHS is really performing nicely...I have the 4x 1TB Samsungs in there now. Will FreeNas have this speed with only 4GB for large files like this?

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Clocker said:
My WHS is really performing nicely...I have the 4x 1TB Samsungs in there now. Will FreeNas have this speed with only 4GB for large files like this?

View attachment 530
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If it's like it was in the past, I was not impressed with network transfer rates. I'm currently working to free up space on my NAS to give it a try. May be several hours before it's up and running to try.

While I'm wasting time shuffling crap around, I found NexentaStor NAS software that was recommended for performance. They offer a "community" edition that offers up to 18TB user capacity before you would have to buy a license. I may also give this a try to see how it performs.

I'm also going to evaluate Windows Storage Server 2012 Standard Edition. It has some nice features claimed for things like deduplication. I'm more interested in performance, but deduplication would be kind of nice to have,
 
I will have to give that a try after your review! :-)

I must say I am amazed at this old WHS v1 installation now that I'm using it more. I downloaded a 2GB torrent (MKV file) of the first episode of Walking Dead and dumped it on my WHS. Added the Serviio DLNA server running as a service and the box is transcoding the file on the fly to play back on my 50" Panasonic ST50 plasma. So easy even a caveman like me can do it. Hope FreeNas or NexentaStor is this easy as I would like to be able to use all the drive space I have rather than having the relatively big WHS install. My CF card & IDE adapter for FreeNas is on the way already.
 
Clocker said:
I will have to give that a try after your review! :-)

I must say I am amazed at this old WHS v1 installation now that I'm using it more. I downloaded a 2GB torrent (MKV file) of the first episode of Walking Dead and dumped it on my WHS. Added the Serviio DLNA server running as a service and the box is transcoding the file on the fly to play back on my 50" Panasonic ST50 plasma. So easy even a caveman like me can do it. Hope FreeNas or NexentaStor is this easy as I would like to be able to use all the drive space I have rather than having the relatively big WHS install. My CF card & IDE adapter for FreeNas is on the way already.
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It'll be a little while. Probably not until tomorrow at the rate data is transferring off my current NAS. If WHS is working well for you, what will FreeNAS get you over and above WHS? The torrent and transcoding sound like fun features. I don't expect NexentaStor to offer that kind of integration. I think it's just a boring NAS tool with no consumer-friendly plug-ins like WHS offers. I downloaded a VM of it also to play with that first before overwriting my NAS. What CF card reader did you end up getting? I'm running my NAS right now with a 200GB drive I had laying around. It's way more than needed, but a nice CF IDE reader would be nice.

I have some time to kill:
ugh.jpg
 
This is the adapter I ordered. http://www.monoprice.com/products/p...=10407&cs_id=1040705&p_id=6266&seq=1&format=2


FreeNAS would just be something new/cool to try. Also, all my HDD space would be then dedicated to storage with the OS being on the CF card. That's cool & geeky to me. So I get a little more storage for my files and some geek factor thrown in. Might not be worth giving up the WHS convenience, at least until I am done watching all the Living Dead episodes. ;)
 
FreeNAS performance over SMB is kind of crummy, mostly due to the fact that Samba is a single-threaded application on FreeBSD. It does considerably better with NFS, but NFS can be a hassle to get going on Windows.
FreeNAS does support DLNA via its plugin interface. It's relatively simple to configure.

From a simple file services standpoint, WHS does work. It's well optimized for its intended purpose (sharing stuff with other Windows machines). FreeNAS is more of a Swiss Army Knife. Tons of flexibility but not always the best tool for any one job.
 
Depends on the version. It's not installed by default, but it's an optional component you can add through Add/Remove Programs or Programs and Features. Once it's installed, you screw around with a command-line tool called nfsadmin to set up client access. I never remember how to do it so I wind up googling every time.
 
timwhit said:
How do you get NFS working on Windows?
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This is one of the reasons I want to try Windows Storage Server 2012. It comes with NFS, CIFS, and iSCSI built in. I want to evaluate the performance of these components.
 
CIFS, NFS and iSCSI support have been baked in to Windows Server since at least Server 2003 (I'm not sure about iSCSI on Server 2000 - I think it was an extra download). The couple of interesting storage-related things on a fully functional Windows server are probably dfs support (sync and distribute files via Active Directory) and, on Server 2012, Storage Spaces support.

I want to play with Storage Spaces and I just haven't yet. I keep having to cannibalize parts out of my Server 2012 box.
 
So far I'm fairly impressed with Windows Storage Server 2012. On large file copies, I was able to push 13GB from my desktop over to the file share with an average of 108MB/sec. What I was trying to validate was if it would slow down if the file size surpassed the amount of RAM in my NAS (6GB). That was absolutely the case with OpenFiler (performance degraded when RAM-cache depleted). That did not seem to be the case with Windows Storage Server 2012. Now that my NAS is running windows, I have access to LSI MegaRaid software and I was able to upgrade the firmware for my Perc 6i. I feel if I get a decent Intel NIC in this thing with some teaming, I might even get some better performance out of it. I cheated a little and setup the array as a 4-drive RAID 10 just to play with. I'll need to play around with this some more, but so far this might be my new NAS OS (and I can RDC to it to configure).
 
I'm looking to find a new motherboard for my NAS. My current config with my AMD X2 4600+ and Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 Motherboard really aren't cutting it. The reason it isn't cutting it is I haven't been able to run both my Perc 6i adapters at the same time in this board. I tried moving the PCIe video board out of the 16x slot and put one of the Perc 6is in there and run with a classic PCI video, but it wouldn't POST when there were two Perc 6is in it. Room is also a bit of an issue and the GA-M57SLI Ethernet controller is temperamental sometimes with support.

I did some searching around, and some suggested a board like a Supermicro MBD-X9SCL+-F Micro ATX Server Motherboard LGA 1155. I like the features on the board and it looks like there is enough spacing on the PCIe slots to fit two Perc 6is in there. I also really like that it has built-in video and built in and even better is the IPMI 2.0. Since the board is considered micro ATX, I'm worried if it really does have enough space to fit two perc 6i and still leave the third PCIe available for a future NIC card. I also read multiple negative reviews so I was curious if anyone has a recommended motherboard that could fit:

I'm looking for something like:
3 x PCIe 8x or better
Single socket (not picky on 1155, 2011, 1366...not picky)
built-in video (either on the board or on a CPU)
Decent integrated NIC(s) (preferably Intel, two would be nice)
Bonus would be IPMI 2.0 (or similar)
RAM DDR3 16GB-32GB MAX (ECC not required)
 
Are you sure it won't post? My first server for the coffin would only initialize video cards in the first PCIex16 slot (even if I had a PCI card in it no video would come out). However, in a fully headless config (no video card at all) the RAID card would work fine. Just had to do all work remotely.
 
Some motherboards have to have PCI graphics manually selected in the BIOS; they don't auto-detect like you might expect.
 
ddrueding said:
Are you sure it won't post? My first server for the coffin would only initialize video cards in the first PCIex16 slot (even if I had a PCI card in it no video would come out). However, in a fully headless config (no video card at all) the RAID card would work fine. Just had to do all work remotely.
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I was reasonably sure, but it's been some time since I tried it. I actually never tried without a video card installed for a headless config. I would need to get into the RAID controller to setup some parameters...but I guess I could do them individually and then reconnect both after setup. It's very possible the ancient PCI video card was damaged or causing a compatibility issue.
 
Mercutio said:
IPMI support would probably limit you to Intel, Supermicro or Tyan. You're probably talking about ECC RAM at that point.
For extra throwback points, the cheap integrated video on this guy is a Matrox G200. Remember those?

Ditch the IPMI and you can talk about something like this instead.
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IPMI isn't a requirement. I just thought it would be nice to have if possible. I'm ok with skipping ECC RAM for the cost savings. I did see it had a built-in Matrox. I was impressed...I haven't seen anything use their cards in a long time. I'm impressed you recommended an Asus board. If I can even find a basic consumer board where I can use an i3/i5 with integrated graphics, that's fine with me...it just needs to have multiple PCIe.
 
I still buy the occasional Asus motherboard. I just don't expect to be able to RMA one.
I can only imagine what twisted world would lead to someone wanting a Xeon CPU with three or more SLI-compatible PCIe slots. I'm going to pretend it involves something with CUDA and Photoshop.
 
Mercutio said:
I still buy the occasional Asus motherboard. I just don't expect to be able to RMA one.
I can only imagine what twisted world would lead to someone wanting a Xeon CPU with three or more SLI-compatible PCIe slots. I'm going to pretend it involves something with CUDA and Photoshop.
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It's not that I want a Xeon. This just seems to be the way these types of boards come configured. It's not that exciting. It's for two Perc 6i controllers and one 4-port NIC (with future consideration for cheaper 10Gb nic).
 
Handruin said:
I was reasonably sure, but it's been some time since I tried it. I actually never tried without a video card installed for a headless config. I would need to get into the RAID controller to setup some parameters...but I guess I could do them individually and then reconnect both after setup. It's very possible the ancient PCI video card was damaged or causing a compatibility issue.
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Remote desktop is your friend...just config the RAID cards after it starts up.
 
I'm already using it for Storage Server 2012. I'll pop in the Perc 6i card, remove the video, and see if it boots up without it.
 
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I just upgraded my WHS box from an E3300 CPU overclocked @ 3.35Ghz to C2Q Q6600 CPU overclocked 3.1Ghz to improve encoding performance. I have no video card, it is onboard G31. With 4 drives at idle it uses 83W. At full load it is 184W. I have a Corsair 400W builders edition PSU, several years old. It is not certified for any level of efficiency. Would using a newer PSU get me any significant power savings?
 
The lowest powered "Platinum" rated PSU is 450W AFAIK (Antec Earthwatts). Running it that far below spec might not get you the efficiency you are looking for.

The Pico PSU 160 is where I would go, but exceeding its rating is a risk.
 
Turns out the psu is actually 80plus certified. Based on the spcr review I should be getting between 78-83% efficiency depending on my load case. Doubt buying a new PSU makes much $en$e.
 
An interesting thing about Storage Spaces: You can create a space of arbitrary size, whether the drives are present to support that amount of storage or not. If you want to make a 144TB space and you only ("only") have 36TB, Windows will let you. It's pretty easy to add drives to a pool, so the end result is that you have some space and you can muck around with the actual drive configuration as you please behind the scenes.
 
I read about that, and in some ways it seems a little strange. ZFS on the other hand, will simply expand/retract the zpool and all zfs filesystems on top of it when you either add or remove media, however will never "lie" about how much storage is really there... IIFC, BRTFS and HAMMER will both act like ZFS in that regard.

It seems like a setup for a big fail in the future... (I wonder how application installers, etc will handle when it sees enough drive space but errors about having no storage actually available).

I can only think that's it's something to do with NTFS being layered on top?
 
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