I have spent most of the beginning of this year re-building my two NAS servers …and then re-re-building them because I wasn’t happy with their performance or some other configuration peculiarity. Not a speedy job when each rebuild requires you to move off 6TB of data and then copy it back when you’re ready!
My biggest problem was getting the RAID stipe alignment right: I cunningly used command line-fu to start partitions at various cylinders to try and get it right, but performance figures suggested I’d got it horribly wrong instead. So then I re-did them using the simple GUI tools provided… and everything worked beautifully. On this occasion, then, GUI 1, CLI 0.
But the job is finally done, and I now have a minimalist CentOS 6.3 purring away on both boxes, one being a mirror of the other and with decent read performance, which is the main thing.
I figured it would be useful not to forget some of these painfully-learnt lessons, so I wrote up the installation and configuration process as a new article.
At some point this year, I will start replacing the drives used with new 3TB WD Red drives… At least I’m now confident that things should be plain sailing at that point.
I’ve bought the same micro server. All I can say is that for SOHO (Small Office/ Home Office) filer, FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE or FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE with ZFS features really rocks ! I’ve never used FreeNAS so I can’t judge the WEBGUI, but with the minimal FreeBSD OS installation with beadm and optionnaly jails (provisionned by ZFS snapshot clones), you have a reliable Filer. The upgrade I’ve done is :
-8 GB RAM
- second Gigabit NIC for loadbalancing heavy uploads
- hacked bios to be able to use the optical bay with AHCI mode, and thus having one HDD for system, and 4 HDD for raidz pool.
HTH l
Regards,
As I said in the previous post, the FreeNAS with raidz worked well at streaming a full Blu-Ray movie, so in the end, performance wasn’t an issue. I imagine my initial glitches with stuttering music was for any number of other reasons, including the raid array sorting itself out after having just been built & populated with data. So yes, N40L and BSD+ZFS performs more than adequately.
In the end, though, nice as it was, BSD in whatever form, and ZFS, aren’t things I’ve got a lot of time to be learning right now, so I decided to stick to CentOS, simply because it’s a known quantity for me. No reflection on BSD!
Incidentally, if you’re copying (say) a 5GB file to the NAS, what throughput are you getting on that Gigabit interface? I am generally only getting around 30MB/sec, which is …what?…480Mb/sec, which isn’t too bad, but seems a bit on the short side.