[Snapky]

Hey everyone!

Sadly last spring my old FreeNAS system quitted… Anyway after this short summer break I want to get a new one back online. I've already looked for some parts and got to the point where I'm hesitating to press the order button.

The setup I've got in my mind:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 1200
MB: ASUS PRIME B350M-A
RAM: Transcend 8GB DDR4 2133 ECC-DIMM 2RX8
HDD: 2 * 8TB Seagate IronWolf + 4 * 3 TB WD RED (From the old build)
PSU: Seasonic Platinum 400 Fanless (400W)
CASE: Fractal Define Mini (Silent?)
OS: FreeNAS

First of all, I don't know if the 8GB RAM are going to work, because of the current prices I'd rather get non-ECC than 16GB ECC… What do you think?

The purpose of this server is mainly going to be the storage of my movies/tv-shows. Additionally I will store my photos and backups of my PC/Laptop on it. However it still needs enough power to serve as a Plex-server for 3 streams (safety factor included).

Is this going to work, so I can press this button without regrets?

Please, any input is appreciated! Thanks!

 

[NexusRed]

I'm pretty sure FreeNAS needs ECC ram. I'm personaly a Open Media Vault/Synology kind of guy. At least take a look at Open Media Vault. It has all of what you need and more.

 

[PuffinMyLye]

With that hardware you want to avoid FreeNAS. It's going to require AT LEAST 16GB of RAM (probably at least 32GB with 48TB of raw storage being used) and yes it needs to be ECC. Also, I wouldn't recommend using drives of different speeds in a striped array. You'd be better off using a NSA option like UnRAID/SnapRAID/Drivepool+Stablebit, etc.

 

[Liranan]

You are using mixed drives with less than 1GB for 1TB of storage you should look into other solutions. I recommend you look into OpenMediaVault (OMV) instead of FreeNAS as it will give you the flexibility you are looking for.

You can use UnRAID but OMV will do everything that UnRAID can do for free and you can use SnapRAID which, I believe, is superior to UnRAID's solution.

I have switched to OMV from Linux Mint and have Plex, SnapRAID, Docker, Samba, OpenVPN and others running in OMV and it works wonderfully.

 

[Snapky]

Quote:

Originally Posted by NexusRed

I'm pretty sure FreeNAS needs ECC ram. I'm personaly a Open Media Vault/Synology kind of guy. At least take a look at Open Media Vault. It has all of what you need and more.

I'll look into it, but I'm already familiar with FreeNAS and I want ZFS.
Quote:

Originally Posted by PuffinMyLye

With that hardware you want to avoid FreeNAS. It's going to require AT LEAST 16GB of RAM (probably at least 32GB with 48TB of raw storage being used) and yes it needs to be ECC. Also, I wouldn't recommend using drives of different speeds in a striped array. You'd be better off using a NSA option like UnRAID/SnapRAID/Drivepool+Stablebit, etc.

Sorry I made a mistake with the drives... there are only 2 * 8TB an 4 * 3TB but I'm thinking about running the 8TB mirrored. But it's not decided yet. Additionaly I'm going with 16GB non-ECC RAM, because of the costs and ZFS is still functional without ECC.

 

[PuffinMyLye]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snapky

I'll look into it, but I'm already familiar with FreeNAS and I want ZFS.
Sorry I made a mistake with the drives... there are only 2 * 8TB an 4 * 3TB but I'm thinking about running the 8TB mirrored. But it's not decided yet. Additionaly I'm going with 16GB non-ECC RAM, because of the costs and ZFS is still functional without ECC.

The question is why are you using ZFS if you're not really taking advantage of any of thr benefits? There are much better options given your hardware.

 

[Snapky]

Quote:

Originally Posted by PuffinMyLye

The question is why are you using ZFS if you're not really taking advantage of any of thr benefits? There are much better options given your hardware.

Well I'm not that experienced with any file system, it's just that many recommend using ZFS even with it's high hardware requirements. But I see that I need to invest more time in learning more about the different file system and their pro/contras. Why wouldn't you use ZFS, just personal preference?

 

[PuffinMyLye]

I
Quote:

Originally Posted by Snapky

Well I'm not that experienced with any file system, it's just that many recommend using ZFS even with it's high hardware requirements. But I see that I need to invest more time in learning more about the different file system and their pro/contras. Why wouldn't you use ZFS, just personal preference?

I do run ZFS, for my VMs. But I use ECC and run my SSD's in mirrors. ZFS is the best file system with regard to file integrity but if you don't use ECC RAM you're losing a lot of those benefits.

Now while I run ZFS for my VMs, I have two 60TB bulk storage servers (one backing up the other) that I in NSA's (non-striped arrays). These servers are mainly for media storage/streaming and thus the files are mainly write once, read often. NSA's have a lot of benefits for media servers. For starters, since the files are not striped across multiple disks, only the drive being accessed needs to be spun up. Furthermore, you can use disks of all sizes (provided your parity disk(s) are at least as big as your largest data disk) and you can easily expand your array by adding new disks at any time. Lastly, if you lose more drives than you have parity for (say you lose 2 disks but are only using single disk parity), you would only lose the data on those 2 disks while the rest of your data is safe.

With your disk configuration, you'd have to run 2 vdevs in ZFS (one mirror of the 8TB drives, and either a mirror or RAIDz1 of the smaller drives). In that scenario you could lose 2 disks and lose your entire pool of data. Just not really worth the risk IMO when you're not even getting all the file integrity benefits of ZFS to begin with.

 

[Snapky]

Alright thank you for your input, but I'm not interested in NSA's, because I don't want to lose my data if one drive fails. I know I can get the most files again but it will cost time. This is why I want some RAID configuration. I decided to use the mirrored array for lazy reasons.... I don't want to wait several days for the recovery of an i.e. 8TB drive in an RAIDZ array.

 

[PuffinMyLye]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snapky

Alright thank you for your input, but I'm not interested in NSA's, because I don't want to lose my data if one drive fails. I know I can get the most files again but it will cost time. This is why I want some RAID configuration. I decided to use the mirrored array for lazy reasons.... I don't want to wait several days for the recovery of an i.e. 8TB drive in an RAIDZ array.

You don't lose your data if one drive fails. With UnRAID you can use up to dual parity which means you'd have to lose 3 drives to lose your data. With SnapRAID you can use up to 6 parity drives if you want.

 

[Snapky]

Quote:

Originally Posted by PuffinMyLye

You don't lose your data if one drive fails. With UnRAID you can use up to dual parity which means you'd have to lose 3 drives to lose your data. With SnapRAID you can use up to 6 parity drives if you want.

Well that sounds interesting... I'll look into it this evening when I've got some spare time. But UnRAID isn't free, that's why I've never thought about using it.

 

[PuffinMyLye]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snapky

Well that sounds interesting... I'll look into it this evening when I've got some spare time. But UnRAID isn't free, that's why I've never thought about using it.

I hear you. UnRAID is more of an all in one solution as it has a nice webgui and good VM/docker support. If you want free, I'd look at OpenMediaVault using SnapRAID. You could also just go with whatever flavor of Linux you want and use SnapRAID + MergerFS.

 

[Liranan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by PuffinMyLye

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snapky

Alright thank you for your input, but I'm not interested in NSA's, because I don't want to lose my data if one drive fails. I know I can get the most files again but it will cost time. This is why I want some RAID configuration. I decided to use the mirrored array for lazy reasons.... I don't want to wait several days for the recovery of an i.e. 8TB drive in an RAIDZ array.

You don't lose your data if one drive fails. With UnRAID you can use up to dual parity which means you'd have to lose 3 drives to lose your data. With SnapRAID you can use up to 6 parity drives if you want.

This is why I use SnapRAID. Once my array has been expanded to 15 drives I will have 10 or 11 data drives, 3 or 4 parity and one spare. UnRAID is easy to work with but lacks the power of OMV. While OMV is meant to be a small home server distro it is deployed on large networks with hundreds of PC's and works perfectly.

After running OMV for a few days I can say it's wonderful. And while I love Mint I regret not switching to OMV sooner on my server.

 

[PuffinMyLye]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Liranan

UnRAID is easy to work with but lacks the power of OMV. While OMV is meant to be a small home server distro it is deployed on large networks with hundreds of PC's and works perfectly.

Can you elaborate on this statement?

 

[Liranan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by PuffinMyLye

Quote:

Originally Posted by Liranan

UnRAID is easy to work with but lacks the power of OMV. While OMV is meant to be a small home server distro it is deployed on large networks with hundreds of PC's and works perfectly.

Can you elaborate on this statement?

I read before switching to OMV that OMV has even been deployed on servers in a network of 200 or more PC's.

 

[Mr.N00bLaR]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Liranan

Quote:

Originally Posted by PuffinMyLye

Quote:

Originally Posted by Liranan

UnRAID is easy to work with but lacks the power of OMV. While OMV is meant to be a small home server distro it is deployed on large networks with hundreds of PC's and works perfectly.

Can you elaborate on this statement?

I read before switching to OMV that OMV has even been deployed on servers in a network of 200 or more PC's.

I don't mean to be rude but that is not a performance metric and doesn't mean anything to me. Was it compared as a NAS with mapped drives on Windows PCs for example while looking at read/write speeds?

 

[Liranan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr.N00bLaR

Quote:

Originally Posted by Liranan

Quote:

Originally Posted by PuffinMyLye

Quote:

Originally Posted by Liranan

UnRAID is easy to work with but lacks the power of OMV. While OMV is meant to be a small home server distro it is deployed on large networks with hundreds of PC's and works perfectly.

Can you elaborate on this statement?

I read before switching to OMV that OMV has even been deployed on servers in a network of 200 or more PC's.

I don't mean to be rude but that is not a performance metric and doesn't mean anything to me. Was it compared as a NAS with mapped drives on Windows PCs for example while looking at read/write speeds?

From my own limited testing I can attest that copying to and from Samba shares is faster than from Windows to Windows but that is due to NTFS being terrible.

 

[PuffinMyLye]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Liranan

I read before switching to OMV that OMV has even been deployed on servers in a network of 200 or more PC's.

I fail to see any built in advantage that OMV would have in an enterprise setup than UnRAID would.

That being said, being someone who is a network administrator by trade, I would never use either one in enterprise mainly because they don't offer support. That's a big no-no when your job could be on the line.

 

[Liranan]

OMV was deployed on a school network and it ran just fine. In entreprise environments CentOS and (Open)SUSE are great choices, though I prefer (Open)SUSE to CentOS as CentOS' makers must be paranoid to lock it down that much.

 

[PuffinMyLye]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Liranan

OMV was deployed on a school network and it ran just fine. In entreprise environments CentOS and (Open)SUSE are great choices, though I prefer (Open)SUSE to CentOS as CentOS' makers must be paranoid to lock it down that much.

You still haven't alluded to what about OMV makes it better/more reliable/more secure in enterprise than UnRAID. All you've said it "OMV was deployed in a school and UnRAID wasn't so that makes it more powerful and a good choice for enterprise." I'm only hearing anecdotes of other anecdotes which is certainly no basis for making these kinds of decisions.