Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
On the ReadyNAS 3100 we did Netgear's proprietary X-RAID http://www.readynas.com/?p=214. From day1 we started with a 4-drive set. Recently when 1 drive was showing a potential failure, I bouoght a replacement, popped the old drive out and popped the new one in. The most time it took me was to find the rack it was in. I do agree 100% with JABR because we were both burned by a RAID5 failure on 2 different machines. Both ZFS and BTRFS have built-in functionality that will give you sufficient protection. On 01/03/2014 09:41 PM, John Abreau wrote: I'm not doing RAID separately. ZFS has the RAID-like functionality baked in already. My personal opinion is that RAID-1 mirroring is more robust than RAID-5. More expensive in terms of disk, but it's a genuine case of you get what you pay for. Sent from my iPad On Jan 1, 2014, at 8:55 AM, Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org wrote: Thanks JABR. In the context of a home NAS and the state of Linux and FreeBSD today where we have a number of viable choices. what would youall chose for a file system and redundancy: For example, ZFS, BTRFS, EXT[3,4], or other. Rely on file system for integrity, RAID1 (strictly mirroring), RAID5, RAID6, RAIDZ (ZFS) Since both ZFS and BTRFS check for problems is it really necessary for a home implementation to use these on combination with RAID, especially if you do frequent backups. On 12/31/2013 11:40 PM, John Abreau wrote: Yes, it's ZFS. As I recall, there were two ZFS options; offhand, I don't recall their names. One was a RAID-1 equivalent, and I believe the other may have been a RAID-5 equivalent. I chose the RAID-1 equivalent. And yes, I still use it. Sent from my iPad On Dec 30, 2013, at 11:53 AM, Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org mailto:g...@blu.org wrote: I assume you are still using your FreeNAS system. What file system are you using, ZFS? On 12/30/2013 10:56 AM, John Abreau wrote: Even if the MyBook Live turns out to be more reliable than I'd expect, that doesn't negate the poor performance of the unit, especially when it's accessed simultaneously by multiple clients. With my usage patterns, that limitation is extremely noticeable. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Ken D'Ambrosio k...@jots.org mailto:k...@jots.org wrote: On 2013-12-30 09:41, John Abreau wrote: After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the consumer-level drives such the MyBook Live as serious options. I think this stance is a little overly cautious; there is data showing that consumer drives don't fail at rates significantly different than server-grade drives -- e.g., http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/12/04/enterprise-drive-reliability/ (though I also remember studies done on significantly larger datasets a couple years ago, but they aren't leaping at me from Google). What I *have* found to be troublesome is that some RAID solutions don't handle drives that spin down very well. For this reason, I tend to either go with server-grade drives, or really do my homework, and find drives that work with the solution (e.g., 3Ware has -- or, at least, had -- an approved hardware list that I find useful). But I think that, with a suitable amount of caution, there's money to be saved here without loss of functionality or increased risk of data loss. $.02, -Ken P.S. One thing I should add here, just from a hoo-boy-did-I-stub-my-toe perspective: as a rule, I usually have my arrays use just a letle bit less than the whole disk. I had a large RAID-5 array once, and one of the drives failed. I got it RMA'd *with the same model number* from the manufacturer... and it was one sector smaller. THAT was annoying. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Mark Komarinski mkomarin...@wayga.org mailto:mkomarin...@wayga.org wrote: On 12/30/2013 1:00 AM, John Abreau wrote: I tried a couple cheaper options such as the WD MyBook Live network drive, but I wasn't really satisfied with them, They were slow to access, slow to spin up when inactive, and had serious performance issues when more than one process was accessing them over NFS, which was the only filesharing option I used. They contained just a single drive, which means no raid-1 safety net when the disk starts to go bad. After getting burned by non-NAS drives in a RAID 5 array, I'm going RAID 1 for home use from now on. Then I picked up an HP N40L mini cube server and installed FreeNAS on it, on a usb thumb drive that I plugged into the internal USB port on the motherboard. It was the first NAS I've tried at home that I was happy with.Performance is much better, even with multiple processes accessing the unit, and large file copies both to and from the unit seem to complete more quickly. Ooh. I forgot about that little guy. Replacement for is seems to be the N54L. Fits 4 drives, might just
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
On 01/02/2014 01:00 PM, Tom Buskey wrote: I've used a Netgear ReadyNAS and a Buffalo TerraStation at work. They couldn't keep up with gigabit ethernet to deliver 40 MB/s because of the ARM. The ReadyNAS 3100 uses an Intel multicore processor not an ARM processor. At work we had a 1Gb LAN and the 2 ethernet ports on the ReadyNAS were bound to 1 IP address. We got much better throughput than we did previously with out 4CPU/2 core Intel whitebox with non-RAID SCSI drives. But, your advice to look at CPU speeds is very good advice. -- Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66 C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 9:35 AM, Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org wrote: On 01/02/2014 01:00 PM, Tom Buskey wrote: I've used a Netgear ReadyNAS and a Buffalo TerraStation at work. They couldn't keep up with gigabit ethernet to deliver 40 MB/s because of the ARM. I should add that this was the 1st version of the ReadyNAS (NV4?), just after it was purchased by Netgear. The ReadyNAS 3100 uses an Intel multicore processor not an ARM processor. At work we had a 1Gb LAN and the 2 ethernet ports on the ReadyNAS were bound to 1 IP address. We got much better throughput than we did previously with out 4CPU/2 core Intel whitebox with non-RAID SCSI Good to know. drives. But, your advice to look at CPU speeds is very good advice. For rules of thumb: Gigabit ethernet is ~ 60 MB/s. I've measured up to 100 MB/s on a high end system. I've seen a Windows 7 system do NFS at 50 MB/s, but 40 MB/s is more typical. A hard drive is usually ~ 60 MB/s after you saturate the cache ram. USB 2.0 is ~ 30 MB/s. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
On 01/03/2014 10:22 AM, Tom Buskey wrote: On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 9:35 AM, Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org mailto:g...@blu.org wrote: On 01/02/2014 01:00 PM, Tom Buskey wrote: I've used a Netgear ReadyNAS and a Buffalo TerraStation at work. They couldn't keep up with gigabit ethernet to deliver 40 MB/s because of the ARM. I should add that this was the 1st version of the ReadyNAS (NV4?), just after it was purchased by Netgear. The ReadyNAS 3100 uses an Intel multicore processor not an ARM processor. At work we had a 1Gb LAN and the 2 ethernet ports on the ReadyNAS were bound to 1 IP address. We got much better throughput than we did previously with out 4CPU/2 core Intel whitebox with non-RAID SCSI Good to know. drives. But, your advice to look at CPU speeds is very good advice. For rules of thumb: Gigabit ethernet is ~ 60 MB/s. I've measured up to 100 MB/s on a high end system. I've seen a Windows 7 system do NFS at 50 MB/s, but 40 MB/s is more typical. A hard drive is usually ~ 60 MB/s after you saturate the cache ram. USB 2.0 is ~ 30 MB/s. Essentially the ReadyNAS product line includes rack mount systems like the 3100 that are relatively high performance, and the desktop systems that might be slower. The NV series uses an IT3107 storage processor. -- Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66 C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
I 1st started running a home file server 12 years ago. Being a sysadmin, I've built my own. Everything here is for the home user. I can kick my family off the server and deal with a week's downtime. I probably can't do that at a business, I've used a Netgear ReadyNAS and a Buffalo TerraStation at work. They couldn't keep up with gigabit ethernet to deliver 40 MB/s because of the ARM. I've heard good things about Synology. I used to use RAID5, but I've switched to RAID1 because I only need to replace 2 drives for more capacity. Also, fewer spindles means lower power use. I don't use hardware RAID. CPUs are fast enough now that the speed isn't that much of an advantage. Dealing with drivers make it harder to repair from bare metal. I've done SCSI, IDE and SATA. I'm at home so I don't care about hotswap. I can power down for a fix. I've used Solaris with disksuite, Linux with mdadm + LVM + ext[234], Solaris with ZFS, OpenSolaris with ZFS and now Linux with ZFS. I'd considered FreeBSD + ZFS. - I run RAID1 for the OS drives. It's saved me a few times. - Put a UPS on it. When it detects a power outage, do an automatic graceful shutdown ASAP. - Have your data on another set of drives. That way an OS upgrade doesn't affect it. - chunk up your data into separate areas. photos books/manuals downloads music wife's home kid's home I've used LVM to set a size for the chunks. Now I use ZFS. LVM requires a umount to change size. zfs is zfs set quota=newsize pool/chunk. I use ZFS on Linux. I run NFS, Samba and http for access via Unixen, Windows, MacOSX and Android. I've run Appletalk for old Macs I play with. I also run mediaservers for DLNA, DAAP, TiVo. Solaris wasn't good at this. FreeBSD probably isn't as good as Linux. I know Synology will do this kind of thing. Once, I had a dual Pentium II w/ 1 GB RAM. It wasn't enough speed for me (I want 40 MB/s on gigabit). I was happy with a dual core 1.8 GHz system with 3 GB RAM. LVM/Ext3 would be ok with less RAM and ZFS wants more. You don't want an old P4 system because it uses too much power. If you need more disks then can fit in the chassis, you can use a 4 port SATA card ($20-$40), long cables and an old PC chassis with a power supply. I ran 8 500 GB drives that way until I replaced them with 2 4TB drives using half the watts. Paid for the upgrade in months. On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 3:09 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) g...@freephile.com wrote: On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 11:25 AM, Mark Komarinski mkomarin...@wayga.orgwrote: Anyway, I ordered the HP N54L, 8GB of RAM, and two 4TB drives. This leaves me with two expansion bays and the ability to use FreeNAS with ZFS. I looked at OMV but it seems to not be as mature as FreeNAS. If anyone's interested I can do another post once it's built and in use. -Mark /me waving hand I'm interested. Finally getting around to (re-)organizing my LAN-wide backups and storage. Greg Rundlett ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
I've been doing something similar to Tom for almost as long (around 10 years). I started with a Linux server (Debian) with a pile of drives running ext2/3. I distributed my files by category across the drives (picture, movies, docs, source code, etc.). However, I got really tired of that a few years ago when ZFS started getting popular and I put together an OpenSolaris box with ZFS and pooled all of my drives together. The Solaris box was all sorts of fun because I originally did that with a PCI PATA software RAID card (specifically purchased because it had a driver for Solaris x86) and mismatched disks (250GB, a few 320GB, a few 160GB) but they will went together in the pool and actually worked reasonably well. I would have been ok with that, but just like Tom, I was trying to use this system as more than just a file server. It was a media server, an IRC client, a VNC host, and a bunch of other things. Solaris's package management and software availability was not that great. So, I moved over to FreeBSD and struggled with the ports system (keeping it updated, resolving conflicts, etc.) for a year or so until I finally gave up on it. By then I had upgraded to 5x400GB SATA drives. I threw them all in a RAID5 under Ubuntu Server and called it a day until the motherboard on that server died. At that point, I just cycled my main desktop down and made that the server with two 2TB USB drives plugged in. One hosts everything and the other is a backup. All backups are done via an hourly rsync (plus I backup my home directories on the server to the backup drive). Some day I'll get back to ZFS, especially now that it's in a stable state on Linux so I can have the best of both worlds. - Chris On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Tom Buskey t...@buskey.name wrote: I 1st started running a home file server 12 years ago. Being a sysadmin, I've built my own. Everything here is for the home user. I can kick my family off the server and deal with a week's downtime. I probably can't do that at a business, I've used a Netgear ReadyNAS and a Buffalo TerraStation at work. They couldn't keep up with gigabit ethernet to deliver 40 MB/s because of the ARM. I've heard good things about Synology. I used to use RAID5, but I've switched to RAID1 because I only need to replace 2 drives for more capacity. Also, fewer spindles means lower power use. I don't use hardware RAID. CPUs are fast enough now that the speed isn't that much of an advantage. Dealing with drivers make it harder to repair from bare metal. I've done SCSI, IDE and SATA. I'm at home so I don't care about hotswap. I can power down for a fix. I've used Solaris with disksuite, Linux with mdadm + LVM + ext[234], Solaris with ZFS, OpenSolaris with ZFS and now Linux with ZFS. I'd considered FreeBSD + ZFS. - I run RAID1 for the OS drives. It's saved me a few times. - Put a UPS on it. When it detects a power outage, do an automatic graceful shutdown ASAP. - Have your data on another set of drives. That way an OS upgrade doesn't affect it. - chunk up your data into separate areas. photos books/manuals downloads music wife's home kid's home I've used LVM to set a size for the chunks. Now I use ZFS. LVM requires a umount to change size. zfs is zfs set quota=newsize pool/chunk. I use ZFS on Linux. I run NFS, Samba and http for access via Unixen, Windows, MacOSX and Android. I've run Appletalk for old Macs I play with. I also run mediaservers for DLNA, DAAP, TiVo. Solaris wasn't good at this. FreeBSD probably isn't as good as Linux. I know Synology will do this kind of thing. Once, I had a dual Pentium II w/ 1 GB RAM. It wasn't enough speed for me (I want 40 MB/s on gigabit). I was happy with a dual core 1.8 GHz system with 3 GB RAM. LVM/Ext3 would be ok with less RAM and ZFS wants more. You don't want an old P4 system because it uses too much power. If you need more disks then can fit in the chassis, you can use a 4 port SATA card ($20-$40), long cables and an old PC chassis with a power supply. I ran 8 500 GB drives that way until I replaced them with 2 4TB drives using half the watts. Paid for the upgrade in months. On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 3:09 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) g...@freephile.com wrote: On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 11:25 AM, Mark Komarinski mkomarin...@wayga.orgwrote: Anyway, I ordered the HP N54L, 8GB of RAM, and two 4TB drives. This leaves me with two expansion bays and the ability to use FreeNAS with ZFS. I looked at OMV but it seems to not be as mature as FreeNAS. If anyone's interested I can do another post once it's built and in use. -Mark /me waving hand I'm interested. Finally getting around to (re-)organizing my LAN-wide backups and storage. Greg Rundlett ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
This is still going strong eh? Guess I'll throw in my cheapo anecdote. I run an atom d510mo board w/ a picoPSU powered with an old monitor DC adapter, 4g of ddr2 I had lying around, and two 3tb drives in raid1. It's running FreeNAS off usb flash at the moment. I'm not a huge fan of the web interface, but once all setup it does what it needs to. Everything I read up on ZFS said I'd need more ram, but I'm getting ~40MB/s. The motherboard I picked up for like $30 off a recycler so I think my total cost was around $220. The DC adapter is only rated for 50w, but I think with staggered spin ups it should be fine. Not exactly enterprise grade though ^_^ On Jan 2, 2014 2:00 PM, Chris Linstid clins...@gmail.com wrote: I've been doing something similar to Tom for almost as long (around 10 years). I started with a Linux server (Debian) with a pile of drives running ext2/3. I distributed my files by category across the drives (picture, movies, docs, source code, etc.). However, I got really tired of that a few years ago when ZFS started getting popular and I put together an OpenSolaris box with ZFS and pooled all of my drives together. The Solaris box was all sorts of fun because I originally did that with a PCI PATA software RAID card (specifically purchased because it had a driver for Solaris x86) and mismatched disks (250GB, a few 320GB, a few 160GB) but they will went together in the pool and actually worked reasonably well. I would have been ok with that, but just like Tom, I was trying to use this system as more than just a file server. It was a media server, an IRC client, a VNC host, and a bunch of other things. Solaris's package management and software availability was not that great. So, I moved over to FreeBSD and struggled with the ports system (keeping it updated, resolving conflicts, etc.) for a year or so until I finally gave up on it. By then I had upgraded to 5x400GB SATA drives. I threw them all in a RAID5 under Ubuntu Server and called it a day until the motherboard on that server died. At that point, I just cycled my main desktop down and made that the server with two 2TB USB drives plugged in. One hosts everything and the other is a backup. All backups are done via an hourly rsync (plus I backup my home directories on the server to the backup drive). Some day I'll get back to ZFS, especially now that it's in a stable state on Linux so I can have the best of both worlds. - Chris On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Tom Buskey t...@buskey.name wrote: I 1st started running a home file server 12 years ago. Being a sysadmin, I've built my own. Everything here is for the home user. I can kick my family off the server and deal with a week's downtime. I probably can't do that at a business, I've used a Netgear ReadyNAS and a Buffalo TerraStation at work. They couldn't keep up with gigabit ethernet to deliver 40 MB/s because of the ARM. I've heard good things about Synology. I used to use RAID5, but I've switched to RAID1 because I only need to replace 2 drives for more capacity. Also, fewer spindles means lower power use. I don't use hardware RAID. CPUs are fast enough now that the speed isn't that much of an advantage. Dealing with drivers make it harder to repair from bare metal. I've done SCSI, IDE and SATA. I'm at home so I don't care about hotswap. I can power down for a fix. I've used Solaris with disksuite, Linux with mdadm + LVM + ext[234], Solaris with ZFS, OpenSolaris with ZFS and now Linux with ZFS. I'd considered FreeBSD + ZFS. - I run RAID1 for the OS drives. It's saved me a few times. - Put a UPS on it. When it detects a power outage, do an automatic graceful shutdown ASAP. - Have your data on another set of drives. That way an OS upgrade doesn't affect it. - chunk up your data into separate areas. photos books/manuals downloads music wife's home kid's home I've used LVM to set a size for the chunks. Now I use ZFS. LVM requires a umount to change size. zfs is zfs set quota=newsize pool/chunk. I use ZFS on Linux. I run NFS, Samba and http for access via Unixen, Windows, MacOSX and Android. I've run Appletalk for old Macs I play with. I also run mediaservers for DLNA, DAAP, TiVo. Solaris wasn't good at this. FreeBSD probably isn't as good as Linux. I know Synology will do this kind of thing. Once, I had a dual Pentium II w/ 1 GB RAM. It wasn't enough speed for me (I want 40 MB/s on gigabit). I was happy with a dual core 1.8 GHz system with 3 GB RAM. LVM/Ext3 would be ok with less RAM and ZFS wants more. You don't want an old P4 system because it uses too much power. If you need more disks then can fit in the chassis, you can use a 4 port SATA card ($20-$40), long cables and an old PC chassis with a power supply. I ran 8 500 GB drives that way until I replaced them with 2 4TB drives using half the watts. Paid for the upgrade in months. On
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 1:59 PM, Chris Linstid clins...@gmail.com wrote: I've been doing something similar to Tom for almost as long (around 10 years). I started with a Linux server (Debian) with a pile of drives running ext2/3. I distributed my files by category across the drives (picture, movies, docs, source code, etc.). However, I got really tired of that a few years ago when ZFS started getting popular and I put together an OpenSolaris box with ZFS and pooled all of my drives together. The Solaris box was all sorts of fun because I originally did that with a PCI PATA software RAID card (specifically purchased because it had a driver for Solaris x86) and mismatched disks (250GB, a few 320GB, a few 160GB) but they will went together in the pool and actually worked reasonably well. I would have been ok with that, but just like Tom, I was trying to use this system as more than Solaris doesn't have the device drivers, so you have to pick hardware carefully. FreeBSD is much better. The good news is that Solaris uses solid hardware that'll be well supported in Linux and other OSen. . Some day I'll get back to ZFS, especially now that it's in a stable state on Linux so I can have the best of both worlds. The ZFS on Linux project distributes source to comply with the license conflict and a build script. apt-get install zfs works once the repo is added. Also, check out the OpenZFS group. It's all the OpenSolaris, *BSD and ZFS on Linux people collaborating on the future direction of ZFS and sharing knowledge. I think most development on ZFS is *not* at Oracle. Solaris 11 will not be able to get the improvements and features added in a compatible way. If you are building a ZFS fileserver, you'll need 64 bits. If you have 4 GB RAM and/or 32 bits, I'd suggest using LVM/Ext3/4 instead. And btrfs when it's fully baked. Oh, and I wish every command line UI was as easy to use as ZFS is. It's like Python to Perl one liners. ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
Thanks JABR. In the context of a home NAS and the state of Linux and FreeBSD today where we have a number of viable choices. what would youall chose for a file system and redundancy: For example, ZFS, BTRFS, EXT[3,4], or other. Rely on file system for integrity, RAID1 (strictly mirroring), RAID5, RAID6, RAIDZ (ZFS) Since both ZFS and BTRFS check for problems is it really necessary for a home implementation to use these on combination with RAID, especially if you do frequent backups. On 12/31/2013 11:40 PM, John Abreau wrote: Yes, it's ZFS. As I recall, there were two ZFS options; offhand, I don't recall their names. One was a RAID-1 equivalent, and I believe the other may have been a RAID-5 equivalent. I chose the RAID-1 equivalent. And yes, I still use it. Sent from my iPad On Dec 30, 2013, at 11:53 AM, Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org mailto:g...@blu.org wrote: I assume you are still using your FreeNAS system. What file system are you using, ZFS? On 12/30/2013 10:56 AM, John Abreau wrote: Even if the MyBook Live turns out to be more reliable than I'd expect, that doesn't negate the poor performance of the unit, especially when it's accessed simultaneously by multiple clients. With my usage patterns, that limitation is extremely noticeable. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Ken D'Ambrosio k...@jots.org mailto:k...@jots.org wrote: On 2013-12-30 09:41, John Abreau wrote: After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the consumer-level drives such the MyBook Live as serious options. I think this stance is a little overly cautious; there is data showing that consumer drives don't fail at rates significantly different than server-grade drives -- e.g., http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/12/04/enterprise-drive-reliability/ (though I also remember studies done on significantly larger datasets a couple years ago, but they aren't leaping at me from Google). What I *have* found to be troublesome is that some RAID solutions don't handle drives that spin down very well. For this reason, I tend to either go with server-grade drives, or really do my homework, and find drives that work with the solution (e.g., 3Ware has -- or, at least, had -- an approved hardware list that I find useful). But I think that, with a suitable amount of caution, there's money to be saved here without loss of functionality or increased risk of data loss. $.02, -Ken P.S. One thing I should add here, just from a hoo-boy-did-I-stub-my-toe perspective: as a rule, I usually have my arrays use just a letle bit less than the whole disk. I had a large RAID-5 array once, and one of the drives failed. I got it RMA'd *with the same model number* from the manufacturer... and it was one sector smaller. THAT was annoying. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Mark Komarinski mkomarin...@wayga.org mailto:mkomarin...@wayga.org wrote: On 12/30/2013 1:00 AM, John Abreau wrote: I tried a couple cheaper options such as the WD MyBook Live network drive, but I wasn't really satisfied with them, They were slow to access, slow to spin up when inactive, and had serious performance issues when more than one process was accessing them over NFS, which was the only filesharing option I used. They contained just a single drive, which means no raid-1 safety net when the disk starts to go bad. After getting burned by non-NAS drives in a RAID 5 array, I'm going RAID 1 for home use from now on. Then I picked up an HP N40L mini cube server and installed FreeNAS on it, on a usb thumb drive that I plugged into the internal USB port on the motherboard. It was the first NAS I've tried at home that I was happy with.Performance is much better, even with multiple processes accessing the unit, and large file copies both to and from the unit seem to complete more quickly. Ooh. I forgot about that little guy. Replacement for is seems to be the N54L. Fits 4 drives, might just get 2x4TB and leave the other two for future expansion. I'm currently using two of the four drive slots with a pair of 2gb drives, configured with ZFS as a raid-1 mirror set. To properly support ZFS, I followed the recommendations in the HOWTO I found online and maxed out the RAM at 8 GB. It's been a couple years since I set it up, so I imagine there's a newer model available by now that will accept larger drives and more RAM. After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the Err, you cut off there... -Mark
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
On 12/31/2013 2:52 PM, Ben Scott wrote: On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Michael Bilow mik...@colossus.bilow.com wrote: This allows the RAID manager (whether hardware or software) to handle the error appropriately, usually by computing what the sector should contain and writing it, thereby causing a reallocation of the failed sector from a reserve of spares. In my experience, the RAID managers I've dealt with (Linux, AMI/LSI, QNAP, Intel, Adaptec) respond to that single bad block by failing the member disk, and requiring a rebuild of the entire member. :-p I haven't had any server disk failures for at least a few years (knock on wood); maybe things have gotten better in that time. Drives can do the remapping internally - there's extra space if there's a read error to move the sector elsewhere. When the number of remapped sectors gets too high, it's used by some vendors to indicate it's in a pre-fail state. SMART can also track that. ZFS seems to handle a bad sector by blocking it from the drive and recreating it via parity/mirroring if possible. Anyway, I ordered the HP N54L, 8GB of RAM, and two 4TB drives. This leaves me with two expansion bays and the ability to use FreeNAS with ZFS. I looked at OMV but it seems to not be as mature as FreeNAS. If anyone's interested I can do another post once it's built and in use. -Mark ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 11:25 AM, Mark Komarinski mkomarin...@wayga.orgwrote: Anyway, I ordered the HP N54L, 8GB of RAM, and two 4TB drives. This leaves me with two expansion bays and the ability to use FreeNAS with ZFS. I looked at OMV but it seems to not be as mature as FreeNAS. If anyone's interested I can do another post once it's built and in use. -Mark /me waving hand I'm interested. Finally getting around to (re-)organizing my LAN-wide backups and storage. Greg Rundlett ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Michael Bilow mik...@colossus.bilow.com wrote: This allows the RAID manager (whether hardware or software) to handle the error appropriately, usually by computing what the sector should contain and writing it, thereby causing a reallocation of the failed sector from a reserve of spares. In my experience, the RAID managers I've dealt with (Linux, AMI/LSI, QNAP, Intel, Adaptec) respond to that single bad block by failing the member disk, and requiring a rebuild of the entire member. :-p I haven't had any server disk failures for at least a few years (knock on wood); maybe things have gotten better in that time. -- Ben ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
On 12/30/2013 1:00 AM, John Abreau wrote: I tried a couple cheaper options such as the WD MyBook Live network drive, but I wasn't really satisfied with them, They were slow to access, slow to spin up when inactive, and had serious performance issues when more than one process was accessing them over NFS, which was the only filesharing option I used. They contained just a single drive, which means no raid-1 safety net when the disk starts to go bad. After getting burned by non-NAS drives in a RAID 5 array, I'm going RAID 1 for home use from now on. Then I picked up an HP N40L mini cube server and installed FreeNAS on it, on a usb thumb drive that I plugged into the internal USB port on the motherboard. It was the first NAS I've tried at home that I was happy with.Performance is much better, even with multiple processes accessing the unit, and large file copies both to and from the unit seem to complete more quickly. Ooh. I forgot about that little guy. Replacement for is seems to be the N54L. Fits 4 drives, might just get 2x4TB and leave the other two for future expansion. I'm currently using two of the four drive slots with a pair of 2gb drives, configured with ZFS as a raid-1 mirror set. To properly support ZFS, I followed the recommendations in the HOWTO I found online and maxed out the RAM at 8 GB. It's been a couple years since I set it up, so I imagine there's a newer model available by now that will accept larger drives and more RAM. After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the Err, you cut off there... -Mark ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the consumer-level drives such the MyBook Live as serious options. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Mark Komarinski mkomarin...@wayga.orgwrote: On 12/30/2013 1:00 AM, John Abreau wrote: I tried a couple cheaper options such as the WD MyBook Live network drive, but I wasn't really satisfied with them, They were slow to access, slow to spin up when inactive, and had serious performance issues when more than one process was accessing them over NFS, which was the only filesharing option I used. They contained just a single drive, which means no raid-1 safety net when the disk starts to go bad. After getting burned by non-NAS drives in a RAID 5 array, I'm going RAID 1 for home use from now on. Then I picked up an HP N40L mini cube server and installed FreeNAS on it, on a usb thumb drive that I plugged into the internal USB port on the motherboard. It was the first NAS I've tried at home that I was happy with.Performance is much better, even with multiple processes accessing the unit, and large file copies both to and from the unit seem to complete more quickly. Ooh. I forgot about that little guy. Replacement for is seems to be the N54L. Fits 4 drives, might just get 2x4TB and leave the other two for future expansion. I'm currently using two of the four drive slots with a pair of 2gb drives, configured with ZFS as a raid-1 mirror set. To properly support ZFS, I followed the recommendations in the HOWTO I found online and maxed out the RAM at 8 GB. It's been a couple years since I set it up, so I imagine there's a newer model available by now that will accept larger drives and more RAM. After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the Err, you cut off there... -Mark ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ -- John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux Unix Email j...@blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / 2013 PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6 2013 / ID 0x920063C6 / FP A5AD 6BE1 FEFE 8E4F 5C23 C2D0 E885 E17C 9200 63C6 2011 / ID 0x32A492D8 / FP 7834 AEC2 EFA3 565C A4B6 9BA4 0ACB AD85 32A4 92D8 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
On 2013-12-30 09:41, John Abreau wrote: After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the consumer-level drives such the MyBook Live as serious options. I think this stance is a little overly cautious; there is data showing that consumer drives don't fail at rates significantly different than server-grade drives -- e.g., http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/12/04/enterprise-drive-reliability/ (though I also remember studies done on significantly larger datasets a couple years ago, but they aren't leaping at me from Google). What I *have* found to be troublesome is that some RAID solutions don't handle drives that spin down very well. For this reason, I tend to either go with server-grade drives, or really do my homework, and find drives that work with the solution (e.g., 3Ware has -- or, at least, had -- an approved hardware list that I find useful). But I think that, with a suitable amount of caution, there's money to be saved here without loss of functionality or increased risk of data loss. $.02, -Ken P.S. One thing I should add here, just from a hoo-boy-did-I-stub-my-toe perspective: as a rule, I usually have my arrays use just a letle bit less than the whole disk. I had a large RAID-5 array once, and one of the drives failed. I got it RMA'd *with the same model number* from the manufacturer... and it was one sector smaller. THAT was annoying. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Mark Komarinski mkomarin...@wayga.org wrote: On 12/30/2013 1:00 AM, John Abreau wrote: I tried a couple cheaper options such as the WD MyBook Live network drive, but I wasn't really satisfied with them, They were slow to access, slow to spin up when inactive, and had serious performance issues when more than one process was accessing them over NFS, which was the only filesharing option I used. They contained just a single drive, which means no raid-1 safety net when the disk starts to go bad. After getting burned by non-NAS drives in a RAID 5 array, I'm going RAID 1 for home use from now on. Then I picked up an HP N40L mini cube server and installed FreeNAS on it, on a usb thumb drive that I plugged into the internal USB port on the motherboard. It was the first NAS I've tried at home that I was happy with.Performance is much better, even with multiple processes accessing the unit, and large file copies both to and from the unit seem to complete more quickly. Ooh. I forgot about that little guy. Replacement for is seems to be the N54L. Fits 4 drives, might just get 2x4TB and leave the other two for future expansion. I'm currently using two of the four drive slots with a pair of 2gb drives, configured with ZFS as a raid-1 mirror set. To properly support ZFS, I followed the recommendations in the HOWTO I found online and maxed out the RAM at 8 GB. It's been a couple years since I set it up, so I imagine there's a newer model available by now that will accept larger drives and more RAM. After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the Err, you cut off there... -Mark ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ [1] -- John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux Unix Email j...@blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net [2] / 2013 PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6 2013 / ID 0x920063C6 / FP A5AD 6BE1 FEFE 8E4F 5C23 C2D0 E885 E17C 9200 63C6 2011 / ID 0x32A492D8 / FP 7834 AEC2 EFA3 565C A4B6 9BA4 0ACB AD85 32A4 92D8 Links: -- [1] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ [2] http://www.abreau.net ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
I have some experience with MyBook. At work we used it as a backup device and it was very, very slow. I think mainly the ARM processor, and limited memory. I would have never used it as a primary NAS. Initially we were using an RHEL Intel white-box server, but later we purchased a NetGear ReadyNAS 3100. The ReadyNAS did an excellent job for us and was faster than the former RHEL server. All 3 systems were Linux-based. The ReadyNAS used a proprietary RAID system that worked flawlessly until we replaced the system with an IBM N-Series. I've been burned by hardware RAID5 in a couple of Dell servers (both Linux and Windows). With a NAS system your objective is throughput and reliability. Both RAID 1 and RAID 5 give you the ability to replace a HD on the fly. I'm wondering if BTRFS would possibly suffice as a NAS system (configured properly). On 12/30/2013 10:18 AM, Ken D'Ambrosio wrote: On 2013-12-30 09:41, John Abreau wrote: After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the consumer-level drives such the MyBook Live as serious options. I think this stance is a little overly cautious; there is data showing that consumer drives don't fail at rates significantly different than server-grade drives -- e.g., http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/12/04/enterprise-drive-reliability/ (though I also remember studies done on significantly larger datasets a couple years ago, but they aren't leaping at me from Google). What I *have* found to be troublesome is that some RAID solutions don't handle drives that spin down very well. For this reason, I tend to either go with server-grade drives, or really do my homework, and find drives that work with the solution (e.g., 3Ware has -- or, at least, had -- an approved hardware list that I find useful). But I think that, with a suitable amount of caution, there's money to be saved here without loss of functionality or increased risk of data loss. $.02, -Ken P.S. One thing I should add here, just from a hoo-boy-did-I-stub-my-toe perspective: as a rule, I usually have my arrays use just a letle bit less than the whole disk. I had a large RAID-5 array once, and one of the drives failed. I got it RMA'd *with the same model number* from the manufacturer... and it was one sector smaller. THAT was annoying. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Mark Komarinski mkomarin...@wayga.org wrote: On 12/30/2013 1:00 AM, John Abreau wrote: I tried a couple cheaper options such as the WD MyBook Live network drive, but I wasn't really satisfied with them, They were slow to access, slow to spin up when inactive, and had serious performance issues when more than one process was accessing them over NFS, which was the only filesharing option I used. They contained just a single drive, which means no raid-1 safety net when the disk starts to go bad. After getting burned by non-NAS drives in a RAID 5 array, I'm going RAID 1 for home use from now on. Then I picked up an HP N40L mini cube server and installed FreeNAS on it, on a usb thumb drive that I plugged into the internal USB port on the motherboard. It was the first NAS I've tried at home that I was happy with.Performance is much better, even with multiple processes accessing the unit, and large file copies both to and from the unit seem to complete more quickly. Ooh. I forgot about that little guy. Replacement for is seems to be the N54L. Fits 4 drives, might just get 2x4TB and leave the other two for future expansion. I'm currently using two of the four drive slots with a pair of 2gb drives, configured with ZFS as a raid-1 mirror set. To properly support ZFS, I followed the recommendations in the HOWTO I found online and maxed out the RAM at 8 GB. It's been a couple years since I set it up, so I imagine there's a newer model available by now that will accept larger drives and more RAM. After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the Err, you cut off there... -Mark ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ [1] -- John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux Unix Email j...@blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net [2] / 2013 PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6 2013 / ID 0x920063C6 / FP A5AD 6BE1 FEFE 8E4F 5C23 C2D0 E885 E17C 9200 63C6 2011 / ID 0x32A492D8 / FP 7834 AEC2 EFA3 565C A4B6 9BA4 0ACB AD85 32A4 92D8 Links: -- [1] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ [2] http://www.abreau.net ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ -- Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
Even if the MyBook Live turns out to be more reliable than I'd expect, that doesn't negate the poor performance of the unit, especially when it's accessed simultaneously by multiple clients. With my usage patterns, that limitation is extremely noticeable. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Ken D'Ambrosio k...@jots.org wrote: On 2013-12-30 09:41, John Abreau wrote: After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the consumer-level drives such the MyBook Live as serious options. I think this stance is a little overly cautious; there is data showing that consumer drives don't fail at rates significantly different than server-grade drives -- e.g., http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/12/04/enterprise-drive-reliability/ (though I also remember studies done on significantly larger datasets a couple years ago, but they aren't leaping at me from Google). What I *have* found to be troublesome is that some RAID solutions don't handle drives that spin down very well. For this reason, I tend to either go with server-grade drives, or really do my homework, and find drives that work with the solution (e.g., 3Ware has -- or, at least, had -- an approved hardware list that I find useful). But I think that, with a suitable amount of caution, there's money to be saved here without loss of functionality or increased risk of data loss. $.02, -Ken P.S. One thing I should add here, just from a hoo-boy-did-I-stub-my-toe perspective: as a rule, I usually have my arrays use just a letle bit less than the whole disk. I had a large RAID-5 array once, and one of the drives failed. I got it RMA'd *with the same model number* from the manufacturer... and it was one sector smaller. THAT was annoying. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Mark Komarinski mkomarin...@wayga.org wrote: On 12/30/2013 1:00 AM, John Abreau wrote: I tried a couple cheaper options such as the WD MyBook Live network drive, but I wasn't really satisfied with them, They were slow to access, slow to spin up when inactive, and had serious performance issues when more than one process was accessing them over NFS, which was the only filesharing option I used. They contained just a single drive, which means no raid-1 safety net when the disk starts to go bad. After getting burned by non-NAS drives in a RAID 5 array, I'm going RAID 1 for home use from now on. Then I picked up an HP N40L mini cube server and installed FreeNAS on it, on a usb thumb drive that I plugged into the internal USB port on the motherboard. It was the first NAS I've tried at home that I was happy with.Performance is much better, even with multiple processes accessing the unit, and large file copies both to and from the unit seem to complete more quickly. Ooh. I forgot about that little guy. Replacement for is seems to be the N54L. Fits 4 drives, might just get 2x4TB and leave the other two for future expansion. I'm currently using two of the four drive slots with a pair of 2gb drives, configured with ZFS as a raid-1 mirror set. To properly support ZFS, I followed the recommendations in the HOWTO I found online and maxed out the RAM at 8 GB. It's been a couple years since I set it up, so I imagine there's a newer model available by now that will accept larger drives and more RAM. After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the Err, you cut off there... -Mark ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ [1] -- John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux Unix Email j...@blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net [2] / 2013 PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6 2013 / ID 0x920063C6 / FP A5AD 6BE1 FEFE 8E4F 5C23 C2D0 E885 E17C 9200 63C6 2011 / ID 0x32A492D8 / FP 7834 AEC2 EFA3 565C A4B6 9BA4 0ACB AD85 32A4 92D8 Links: -- [1] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ [2] http://www.abreau.net ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ -- John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux Unix Email j...@blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / 2013 PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6 2013 / ID 0x920063C6 / FP A5AD 6BE1 FEFE 8E4F 5C23 C2D0 E885 E17C 9200 63C6 2011 / ID 0x32A492D8 / FP 7834 AEC2 EFA3 565C A4B6 9BA4 0ACB AD85 32A4 92D8 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
I assume you are still using your FreeNAS system. What file system are you using, ZFS? On 12/30/2013 10:56 AM, John Abreau wrote: Even if the MyBook Live turns out to be more reliable than I'd expect, that doesn't negate the poor performance of the unit, especially when it's accessed simultaneously by multiple clients. With my usage patterns, that limitation is extremely noticeable. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Ken D'Ambrosio k...@jots.org mailto:k...@jots.org wrote: On 2013-12-30 09:41, John Abreau wrote: After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the consumer-level drives such the MyBook Live as serious options. I think this stance is a little overly cautious; there is data showing that consumer drives don't fail at rates significantly different than server-grade drives -- e.g., http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/12/04/enterprise-drive-reliability/ (though I also remember studies done on significantly larger datasets a couple years ago, but they aren't leaping at me from Google). What I *have* found to be troublesome is that some RAID solutions don't handle drives that spin down very well. For this reason, I tend to either go with server-grade drives, or really do my homework, and find drives that work with the solution (e.g., 3Ware has -- or, at least, had -- an approved hardware list that I find useful). But I think that, with a suitable amount of caution, there's money to be saved here without loss of functionality or increased risk of data loss. $.02, -Ken P.S. One thing I should add here, just from a hoo-boy-did-I-stub-my-toe perspective: as a rule, I usually have my arrays use just a letle bit less than the whole disk. I had a large RAID-5 array once, and one of the drives failed. I got it RMA'd *with the same model number* from the manufacturer... and it was one sector smaller. THAT was annoying. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Mark Komarinski mkomarin...@wayga.org mailto:mkomarin...@wayga.org wrote: On 12/30/2013 1:00 AM, John Abreau wrote: I tried a couple cheaper options such as the WD MyBook Live network drive, but I wasn't really satisfied with them, They were slow to access, slow to spin up when inactive, and had serious performance issues when more than one process was accessing them over NFS, which was the only filesharing option I used. They contained just a single drive, which means no raid-1 safety net when the disk starts to go bad. After getting burned by non-NAS drives in a RAID 5 array, I'm going RAID 1 for home use from now on. Then I picked up an HP N40L mini cube server and installed FreeNAS on it, on a usb thumb drive that I plugged into the internal USB port on the motherboard. It was the first NAS I've tried at home that I was happy with.Performance is much better, even with multiple processes accessing the unit, and large file copies both to and from the unit seem to complete more quickly. Ooh. I forgot about that little guy. Replacement for is seems to be the N54L. Fits 4 drives, might just get 2x4TB and leave the other two for future expansion. I'm currently using two of the four drive slots with a pair of 2gb drives, configured with ZFS as a raid-1 mirror set. To properly support ZFS, I followed the recommendations in the HOWTO I found online and maxed out the RAM at 8 GB. It's been a couple years since I set it up, so I imagine there's a newer model available by now that will accept larger drives and more RAM. After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the Err, you cut off there... -Mark ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org mailto:gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ [1] -- John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux Unix Email j...@blu.org mailto:j...@blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net [2] / 2013 PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6 2013 / ID 0x920063C6 / FP A5AD 6BE1 FEFE 8E4F 5C23 C2D0 E885 E17C 9200 63C6 2011 / ID 0x32A492D8 / FP 7834 AEC2 EFA3 565C A4B6 9BA4 0ACB AD85 32A4 92D8 Links: -- [1] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ [2] http://www.abreau.net ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org mailto:gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
I switched about 2 years bac from FreeNAS to OpenMediaVault build on Debian.. with 3 1tb sata drives. I set it up with ext4 f/s.. Has run nicely without any issues.. http://www.openmediavault.org/ JFeole On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 11:53 AM, Jerry Feldman g...@blu.org wrote: I assume you are still using your FreeNAS system. What file system are you using, ZFS? On 12/30/2013 10:56 AM, John Abreau wrote: Even if the MyBook Live turns out to be more reliable than I'd expect, that doesn't negate the poor performance of the unit, especially when it's accessed simultaneously by multiple clients. With my usage patterns, that limitation is extremely noticeable. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Ken D'Ambrosio k...@jots.org wrote: On 2013-12-30 09:41, John Abreau wrote: After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the consumer-level drives such the MyBook Live as serious options. I think this stance is a little overly cautious; there is data showing that consumer drives don't fail at rates significantly different than server-grade drives -- e.g., http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/12/04/enterprise-drive-reliability/ (though I also remember studies done on significantly larger datasets a couple years ago, but they aren't leaping at me from Google). What I *have* found to be troublesome is that some RAID solutions don't handle drives that spin down very well. For this reason, I tend to either go with server-grade drives, or really do my homework, and find drives that work with the solution (e.g., 3Ware has -- or, at least, had -- an approved hardware list that I find useful). But I think that, with a suitable amount of caution, there's money to be saved here without loss of functionality or increased risk of data loss. $.02, -Ken P.S. One thing I should add here, just from a hoo-boy-did-I-stub-my-toe perspective: as a rule, I usually have my arrays use just a letle bit less than the whole disk. I had a large RAID-5 array once, and one of the drives failed. I got it RMA'd *with the same model number* from the manufacturer... and it was one sector smaller. THAT was annoying. On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Mark Komarinski mkomarin...@wayga.org wrote: On 12/30/2013 1:00 AM, John Abreau wrote: I tried a couple cheaper options such as the WD MyBook Live network drive, but I wasn't really satisfied with them, They were slow to access, slow to spin up when inactive, and had serious performance issues when more than one process was accessing them over NFS, which was the only filesharing option I used. They contained just a single drive, which means no raid-1 safety net when the disk starts to go bad. After getting burned by non-NAS drives in a RAID 5 array, I'm going RAID 1 for home use from now on. Then I picked up an HP N40L mini cube server and installed FreeNAS on it, on a usb thumb drive that I plugged into the internal USB port on the motherboard. It was the first NAS I've tried at home that I was happy with.Performance is much better, even with multiple processes accessing the unit, and large file copies both to and from the unit seem to complete more quickly. Ooh. I forgot about that little guy. Replacement for is seems to be the N54L. Fits 4 drives, might just get 2x4TB and leave the other two for future expansion. I'm currently using two of the four drive slots with a pair of 2gb drives, configured with ZFS as a raid-1 mirror set. To properly support ZFS, I followed the recommendations in the HOWTO I found online and maxed out the RAM at 8 GB. It's been a couple years since I set it up, so I imagine there's a newer model available by now that will accept larger drives and more RAM. After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the Err, you cut off there... -Mark ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ [1] -- John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux Unix Email j...@blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net [2] / 2013 PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6 2013 / ID 0x920063C6 / FP A5AD 6BE1 FEFE 8E4F 5C23 C2D0 E885 E17C 9200 63C6 2011 / ID 0x32A492D8 / FP 7834 AEC2 EFA3 565C A4B6 9BA4 0ACB AD85 32A4 92D8 Links: -- [1] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ [2] http://www.abreau.net ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ -- John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux Unix Email j...@blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / 2013 PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6 2013 / ID 0x920063C6 / FP
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
I don't know what the current crop of WD Desktop drives is like but when I was evaluating them for inclusion in a product about 4 yrs ago they didn't make the cut. In addition to mediocre xfer speeds their design seemed to indicate unfamiliarity with (or disregard for) basic concerns like physical stability. Their stylish pedestal package had blinkenlights and a dramatic sci-fi appearance, but the center of gravity was so high and the pedestal's footprint so small that they tipped over given the slightest nudge. Also, they offered no (or too little) control over the permanently enabled power-saving feature, the device taking long enough to spin back up and become available that it was sometimes abandoned by the kernel as faulty. I suspect the single design criterion was the usual does-it-work-with-Windows. If they've addressed such concerns in the meantime then they may deserve consideration, otherwise... ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
On 2013-12-30 at 10:18 -0500, Ken D'Ambrosio wrote: On 2013-12-30 09:41, John Abreau wrote: After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the consumer-level drives such the MyBook Live as serious options. I think this stance is a little overly cautious; there is data showing that consumer drives don't fail at rates significantly different than server-grade drives -- e.g., http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/12/04/enterprise-drive-reliability/ (though I also remember studies done on significantly larger datasets a couple years ago, but they aren't leaping at me from Google). What I *have* found to be troublesome is that some RAID solutions don't handle drives that spin down very well. Server-class drives are very different in at least two major ways. First, a basic operational failure, such as a bad sector read, will cause a consumer-class drive to retry pretty much forever, while such an error will be reported relatively rapidly to the controller in a server-class drive. This allows the RAID manager (whether hardware or software) to handle the error appropriately, usually by computing what the sector should contain and writing it, thereby causing a reallocation of the failed sector from a reserve of spares. Software RAID on Linux, for example, provides for a periodic scrubbing operation that test reads every sector; Debian codes this as a monthly checkarray cron job. Second, server-class drives are tested for 24x7 operation and rated accordingly with longer warranties that take this into account. Seagate consumer drives are specified with MTBF based on operation about 9 hours per day Monday through Friday, a typical work week. Western Digital specifies error performance an order of magnitude better in their top server-class drives, 1 in 10^16, compared to their consumer-class drivers, 1 in 10^15 -- which may not seem like much, but actually does have practical effect when dealing with multi-terabyte arrays. Not everything that goes wrong in a RAID system takes the spindle off-line, which is important to remember. I obviously cannot dispute the Backblaze data, but their application is relatively quiescent and therefore unusual. Most server-class drives are operated under heavy demand in something like an e-mail server or a database server, and even the Backblaze article notes that this could significantly affect their results. Increased activity caused increased heat, the great enemy of the drive. To a large extent, though, you are paying for the longer warranty. For this reason, I tend to either go with server-grade drives, or really do my homework, and find drives that work with the solution Lately there has been a trend among manufacturers to introduce price-differentiated grades of server-class drives, notably the new Western Digital Red line costing less than their Se enterprise value-priced line and their Re enterprise full-priced line. At 4TB a Red (WD40EFRX) is about $190, a Se (WD4000F9YZ) is about $280, and a Re (WD4000FYYZ) is about $320. Much of the increased reliability of the Red comes from simply spinning it at 5400RPM instead of 7200RPM, and much of the decreased cost comes from providing a 3-year warranty instead of a 5-year warranty. By comparison, a consumer-class Green (WD40EZRX) is about $170, spinning at 5400RPM and the warranty cut to 2 years. (e.g., 3Ware has -- or, at least, had -- an approved hardware list that I find useful). But I think that, with a suitable amount of caution, there's money to be saved here without loss of functionality or increased risk of data loss. I've been too badly burned on 3Ware RAID controllers to use them ever again. Regardless, in the vast majority of cases these days, I recommend using software RAID rather than hardware RAID on Linux servers unless there are special requirements, such as for hot-swap capability or for absolute maximum performance. P.S. One thing I should add here, just from a hoo-boy-did-I-stub-my-toe perspective: as a rule, I usually have my arrays use just a letle bit less than the whole disk. I had a large RAID-5 array once, and one of the drives failed. I got it RMA'd *with the same model number* from the manufacturer... and it was one sector smaller. THAT was annoying. Although not generally known and hardly recommended practice, Linux software RAID can handle that case. -- Mike ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
What are you doing for home NAS?
I have a bit of end-of-the-year money that I'd like to spend and thinking of a dedicated NAS device for my home rather than having hard drives start spilling out of my basement server. I figure I need about 4TB usable, so either 2x4TB or 4x2 or 3TB is a configuration I could work with. In looking at the products that are out there for standalone NAS, they're REALLY expensive even before adding the cost of drives. The two-drive systems seem to be just barely adequate for my needs, and the four-bay ones jack the price up to just going BYO ($700-$800 without drives). Even then, the Drobo a friend has puts its NFS server in userspace (WTF?) so performance and features like file locking are lacking. So I ask the question - what are you doing at home? Build my own? Have any device that's still for sale you can recommend? Anyone using FreeNAS and have suggestions? -Mark ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
Good question Mark - I'm looking forward to see what responses it gets. At work I recently had a conversation with a fellow at Winchester Data Systems for work.. he sent me the information I'm quoting below - it was in response to a query I had about getting some archival storage setup at work but only a couple TB worth. For *my* purposes he was recommending getting two systems but for your needs you'll be find with one I reckon... check out http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822107116https://owa.nyam.org/owa/redir.aspx?C=db4192872e674570b2904dcfc41ff014URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.newegg.com%2fProduct%2fProduct.aspx%3fItem%3dN82E16822107116 That is an example of a low-end system that is “reasonable” (keep in mind, WDS is high-end and blows this stuff away). I cannot see the drive compatibility list out here, but PLEASE do not get any SATA drives – SAS only. Run this in RAID mode. BUY TWO OF THESE SYSTEMS, and say 10 drives (4 for each system, and 2 on the shelf for sparing – all with the same rev f/w level). Keeping all the firmware on the drives the same is critical over time (in 3-5 years, you will be glad you have these). You should be able to get this up and running in a week, and in my mind, you have duplicate copies on both servers. Put one server on a subnet that NO ONE can see – your on-line backup copy. The other one is the primary one for people to access. Hope this info has some value. J. On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Mark Komarinski mkomarin...@wayga.orgwrote: I have a bit of end-of-the-year money that I'd like to spend and thinking of a dedicated NAS device for my home rather than having hard drives start spilling out of my basement server. I figure I need about 4TB usable, so either 2x4TB or 4x2 or 3TB is a configuration I could work with. In looking at the products that are out there for standalone NAS, they're REALLY expensive even before adding the cost of drives. The two-drive systems seem to be just barely adequate for my needs, and the four-bay ones jack the price up to just going BYO ($700-$800 without drives). Even then, the Drobo a friend has puts its NFS server in userspace (WTF?) so performance and features like file locking are lacking. So I ask the question - what are you doing at home? Build my own? Have any device that's still for sale you can recommend? Anyone using FreeNAS and have suggestions? -Mark ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ -- http://about.me/joshuafreeman http://joshuasfreeman.me ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
I've found that NFS has been sufficient for my needs at home. I had picked up a SuperMicro Atom motherboard (MBD-X7SPA-H-O) and used that to build a home NAS. I didn't use FreeNAS, or any other custom distribution. I've been running CentOS on this. I have 4 WD black drives in a md raid-5 (3+1 spare). Thinking of switching to the WD red drives at some point though when I need more room. Definitely found that running jumbo frames on the ethernet side helps (9000 MTU). Michael On Sun, 29 Dec 2013 17:34:57 -0500 Mark Komarinski mkomarin...@wayga.org wrote: I have a bit of end-of-the-year money that I'd like to spend and thinking of a dedicated NAS device for my home rather than having hard drives start spilling out of my basement server. I figure I need about 4TB usable, so either 2x4TB or 4x2 or 3TB is a configuration I could work with. In looking at the products that are out there for standalone NAS, they're REALLY expensive even before adding the cost of drives. The two-drive systems seem to be just barely adequate for my needs, and the four-bay ones jack the price up to just going BYO ($700-$800 without drives). Even then, the Drobo a friend has puts its NFS server in userspace (WTF?) so performance and features like file locking are lacking. So I ask the question - what are you doing at home? Build my own? Have any device that's still for sale you can recommend? Anyone using FreeNAS and have suggestions? -Mark ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
Re: What are you doing for home NAS?
I tried a couple cheaper options such as the WD MyBook Live network drive, but I wasn't really satisfied with them, They were slow to access, slow to spin up when inactive, and had serious performance issues when more than one process was accessing them over NFS, which was the only filesharing option I used. They contained just a single drive, which means no raid-1 safety net when the disk starts to go bad. Then I picked up an HP N40L mini cube server and installed FreeNAS on it, on a usb thumb drive that I plugged into the internal USB port on the motherboard. It was the first NAS I've tried at home that I was happy with.Performance is much better, even with multiple processes accessing the unit, and large file copies both to and from the unit seem to complete more quickly. I'm currently using two of the four drive slots with a pair of 2gb drives, configured with ZFS as a raid-1 mirror set. To properly support ZFS, I followed the recommendations in the HOWTO I found online and maxed out the RAM at 8 GB. It's been a couple years since I set it up, so I imagine there's a newer model available by now that will accept larger drives and more RAM. After trying FreeNAS, I'd no longer consider the On Sun, Dec 29, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Mark Komarinski mkomarin...@wayga.orgwrote: I have a bit of end-of-the-year money that I'd like to spend and thinking of a dedicated NAS device for my home rather than having hard drives start spilling out of my basement server. I figure I need about 4TB usable, so either 2x4TB or 4x2 or 3TB is a configuration I could work with. In looking at the products that are out there for standalone NAS, they're REALLY expensive even before adding the cost of drives. The two-drive systems seem to be just barely adequate for my needs, and the four-bay ones jack the price up to just going BYO ($700-$800 without drives). Even then, the Drobo a friend has puts its NFS server in userspace (WTF?) so performance and features like file locking are lacking. So I ask the question - what are you doing at home? Build my own? Have any device that's still for sale you can recommend? Anyone using FreeNAS and have suggestions? -Mark ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ -- John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux Unix Email j...@blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / 2013 PGP-Key-ID 0x920063C6 2013 / ID 0x920063C6 / FP A5AD 6BE1 FEFE 8E4F 5C23 C2D0 E885 E17C 9200 63C6 2011 / ID 0x32A492D8 / FP 7834 AEC2 EFA3 565C A4B6 9BA4 0ACB AD85 32A4 92D8 ___ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
