Choosing a NAS?

So my Windows Home Server is filling up - I've got 4x2TB drives in there at the moment, leaving one spare bay for backups, and WHS can't accept 3TB drives to my knowledge, not without hacking it anyway. That gives me 4 options, as far as I can see:

1) Buy an additional 5-bay hub for my server for £300
2) Upgrade to Home Server 2011 and use a third party equivalent to DE
3) Build a FreeNAS box
4) Buy a NAS

I'm not really keen on doing the first, because it just delays the problem, and I'm not keen on the second either - don't like the idea of using third-party tools when it comes to data security.

That leaves options 3 and 4. So, two main queries.

1) Does ZFS in FreeNAS provide many benefits to a home user for a a home server of around 10TB?
2) What sort of RAID system would I be looking at? I've always been concerned that with RAID 5, a failure during rebuild is incredibly likely, and I also know that they tend to take absolutely hours? I have 5TB of raw data at the moment, so a RAID1 or RAID10 system would take six 2TB drives to run effectively which seems a bit overkill.

I'm guessing also that it starts to get incredibly expensive... :(

i have always been a bit weary of zfs on bsd as is never seams to be all that stable. i was planning to use it on my server but when i was using it it kept eating data. that was a while ago and things have probably changed.

i use jfs ontop of linux md5raid on my fileserver managing around 8tb across 2 arrays with 3 2tb drives and 5 1tb drives. linux md gets faster the more drives you add. my 5 disk array can pull 250Mb/s with some first gen green drives which is mighty impressive . with rebuilds it works at around 60-70mb/s which for 2tb drives works out at about 480 minutes. you will only get another drive failure if you are unlucky. you also have the option of raid 6 if you are using 6 or more drive it gives you the space of 4 of the drives on 6 drives. you can also create an array in a degraded state and add the missing drives as you migrate them

If your happy with the WHS OS then why not build a whs rig in a case which can accomodate a lot more HDDs, you wouldnt need any new drives, presumably you could use the serial from your current copy? Something in a case which can accomodate 10+ disks?

Hawker

Unfortunately you're a bit stuck here.
http://subnetmask255x4.wordpress.com...-impacts-raid/
Read this and compare it to your setup.
Yep, you're looking at a significant chance that you suffer an unrecoverable bit error during a rebuild operation.
ZFS was designed to work around this problem and the problem of silent bit errors - that is where bit errors occur just perfectly to appear valid to the HDD's ECC systems, despite being the wrong data.
There's only one problem with ZFS.

It's cr*p and simply doesn't work for small scale setups in the real world. I have lost data as a result of putting my trust in Nexentastor and ZFS. Look at this thread
http://forums.hexus.net/shopping-ret...ver-100-a.html

I'm sure some people here will rush in to defend the almighty ZFS and point out some case studies where it's saved the world and point out it's designed from the ground up to keep your data as safe as possible, but I'll just point them to all of the posts here where people are having nothing but trouble with it including data loss.

I think the best thing you can do is look into RAID6, forget drive extender and try out the various free NAS appliances.
FreeNAS is one, Openfiler is another. I can't remember the names of others off the top of my head.

I can't help but think it would be nice to see ZFS on linux but it's not likely soon as the Open source licenses of ZFS and The linux kernel are incompatible.
I suspect that with the far larger developer base on Linux, ZFS bugs would get ironed out sooner than they currently are.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hawker1986

If your happy with the WHS OS then why not build a whs rig in a case which can accomodate a lot more HDDs, you wouldnt need any new drives, presumably you could use the serial from your current copy? Something in a case which can accomodate 10+ disks?

Hawker

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Primarily because I have a prebuilt Tranquil server that I'm very happy with - I'm loathe to rip it apart, hence my suggestion of 1) Buying a Tranquil extender, which would give me a total capacity of 9 disks, plus one for backup.

It's just that £300 seems like a lot of money to spend for that capability.

I guess I could theoretically build a new WHS with 10+ disk capacity and run them in tandem (licenses aren't a problem) but the 2TB disk problem is only going to become more of a pain in the neck as the years go by.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by badass

Unfortunately you're a bit stuck here.
http://subnetmask255x4.wordpress.com...-impacts-raid/
Read this and compare it to your setup.
Yep, you're looking at a significant chance that you suffer an unrecoverable bit error during a rebuild operation.
ZFS was designed to work around this problem and the problem of silent bit errors - that is where bit errors occur just perfectly to appear valid to the HDD's ECC systems, despite being the wrong data.
There's only one problem with ZFS.

It's cr*p and simply doesn't work for small scale setups in the real world. I have lost data as a result of putting my trust in Nexentastor and ZFS. Look at this thread
http://forums.hexus.net/shopping-ret...ver-100-a.html

I'm sure some people here will rush in to defend the almighty ZFS and point out some case studies where it's saved the world and point out it's designed from the ground up to keep your data as safe as possible, but I'll just point them to all of the posts here where people are having nothing but trouble with it including data loss.

I think the best thing you can do is look into RAID6, forget drive extender and try out the various free NAS appliances.
FreeNAS is one, Openfiler is another. I can't remember the names of others off the top of my head.

I can't help but think it would be nice to see ZFS on linux but it's not likely soon as the Open source licenses of ZFS and The linux kernel are incompatible.
I suspect that with the far larger developer base on Linux, ZFS bugs would get ironed out sooner than they currently are.

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Great post, thanks very much for the info.

That information in your first post is exactly what I'm concerned about - that's why I was interested in ZFS. So if that's out of the window, there seems very little point in building a 10TB RAID5 array to me.

It's probably going to have to be RAID6 then. I want, ideally, 10TB of storage, so RAID10 would require another six 2TB drives for ten in total, which is insane. RAID6 would require another three 2TB drives for seven in total, which is more reasonable.

What kind of horsepower would I need to run a speedy RAID6 array over up to ten drives? I'm guessing I would really have to build it myself rather than getting an off the shelf NAS?

Just another thought I'm throwing out there - would it be possible, theoretically, to run two NAS units on JBOD with some sort of failover system as an alternative to RAID?

I don't know much about NAS devices but for my personal storage after being very dissapointed that new WHS wouldnt have DE I built a system based on Amahi.

http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Main_Page

Obviously it's nowhere near as slick as WHS being linux but I've found it perfect for my needs. "Greyhole" is the part of it that works like DE.

http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Greyhole

It has been perfect for my needs, although its always a bit scary when you want to update it or something.

Dependent on budget you could always build a couple of Openfiler boxes and run them as a cluster. My experience with ZFS pretty much matches that of both Badass and Alsenior though - the idea behind it is brilliant, but it's just too flaky on consumer grade kit for my liking.

As for speed - software raid (like mdraid) is always going to be slower and take longer to build than something on a hardware RAID controller, but again this will be massively influenced by your budget - a hardware card that will do RAID6 with the number of ports you want will be expensive, especially as it'll likely need a BBWC.

If it's any use to you my experience with Openfiler 2.99 installed to a USB key in my Microserver has been pretty positive once it was built (bear in mind I've spent around 3 weeks testing NexentaStor, FreeNAS, Ubuntu Server and Openfiler before coming to this conclusion). This only gives you 5 discs (if you put one in the 5.25" bay at the top) which will give you around 9Tb in RAID6 (if using 3Tb discs, I'm using 2Tb discs) so this is probably too small for you, but the alternative would be to buy a couple of units and run them as either JBOD or RAID0, then cluster the 2 units. I'd find that option a little tempting if I were in your shoes, especially given the current £100 cashback per unit at the mo.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by snootyjim

Great post, thanks very much for the info.

That information in your first post is exactly what I'm concerned about - that's why I was interested in ZFS. So if that's out of the window, there seems very little point in building a 10TB RAID5 array to me.

It's probably going to have to be RAID6 then. I want, ideally, 10TB of storage, so RAID10 would require another six 2TB drives for ten in total, which is insane. RAID6 would require another three 2TB drives for seven in total, which is more reasonable.

What kind of horsepower would I need to run a speedy RAID6 array over up to ten drives? I'm guessing I would really have to build it myself rather than getting an off the shelf NAS?

Just another thought I'm throwing out there - would it be possible, theoretically, to run two NAS units on JBOD with some sort of failover system as an alternative to RAID?

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A single core on a Opteron 2214HE can put through 4231MB/s using linux-md

Code:

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[    1.502511] raid6: int64x1  1805 MB/s
[    1.672512] raid6: int64x2  2367 MB/s
[    1.842508] raid6: int64x4  1605 MB/s
[    2.012505] raid6: int64x8  1613 MB/s
[    2.182512] raid6: sse2x1    3045 MB/s
[    2.352507] raid6: sse2x2    4064 MB/s
[    2.522504] raid6: sse2x4    4231 MB/s
[    2.522506] raid6: using algorithm sse2x4 (4231 MB/s)

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a core2 or a Athlon x2 should be more than sufficient under linux md you're only problem is finding a motherboard with enough ports to host everything. i recommend a Dell sas 5 i/r as there good simple controllers witch support sata hotplug

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Splash

If it's any use to you my experience with Openfiler 2.99 installed to a USB key in my Microserver has been pretty positive once it was built (bear in mind I've spent around 3 weeks testing NexentaStor, FreeNAS, Ubuntu Server and Openfiler before coming to this conclusion). This only gives you 5 discs (if you put one in the 5.25" bay at the top) which will give you around 9Tb in RAID6 (if using 3Tb discs, I'm using 2Tb discs) so this is probably too small for you, but the alternative would be to buy a couple of units and run them as either JBOD or RAID0, then cluster the 2 units. I'd find that option a little tempting if I were in your shoes, especially given the current £100 cashback per unit at the mo.

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Okay, that might be an option then. How would you cluster the 2 units? Is it fairly seamless?

EDIT: Actually, on second thoughts, I might just split everything down. Whilst I need 10TB of storage, there's no reason why it all has to reside on the same device.

There's no reason why I couldn't have a significant proportion of that on the WHS and just shift out the rest of the storage to a second server. And theoretically, a third server. Each one could handle a different type of data, so \\backupserver \\mediaserver etc. This could work :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by snootyjim

Okay, that might be an option then. How would you cluster the 2 units? Is it fairly seamless?

EDIT: Actually, on second thoughts, I might just split everything down. Whilst I need 10TB of storage, there's no reason why it all has to reside on the same device.

There's no reason why I couldn't have a significant proportion of that on the WHS and just shift out the rest of the storage to a second server. And theoretically, a third server. Each one could handle a different type of data, so \\backupserver \\mediaserver etc. This could work :)

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That's an idea. I've not actually used clustering in Openfiler before, so I'm just knocking up a couple of VMs to test it with now. I'll report back with the results - even if you decide not to go down that route it might be of use to someone else in the future (and I'm pretty bored, and hayfever is killing me at the mo, so I can't just go out and play footy orr something)

EDIT - howto for setting up clustering at http://access.rzschernsdorf.de/downl...owtoforge.html

Would you actually need clustering, or would rsync from one to the other cover your requirements?

Splash, do you have any performance stats on Openfiler vs FreeNAS? I really need to get off OpenSolaris asap, but I really do like the security blanket of ZFS.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Splash

EDIT - howto for setting up clustering at http://access.rzschernsdorf.de/downl...owtoforge.html

Would you actually need clustering, or would rsync from one to the other cover your requirements?

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If I was going to do it, it would definitely be clustered. All my backups of server data are offline for safekeeping, I don't have any live backup systems.

However, I've decided that I'm definitely not going to. To cut a long story short, all my data is built up of separate major directories, which are at most 2TB each. Since there's no major difference between \\server\media and \\servermedia\, unless a directory grows larger than the maximum capacity of a server, it doesn't seem worth investing any time or effort in creating massive file servers. If the HP server can hold 9TB of data at the most, that's probably a very long time away. And by then we'll have larger hard drives anyway.

My current plan is to get the HP server, stick 2x2TB drives in there for a 4TB JBOD or similar, shift 3TB of data from the WHS to the HP server, and remove the no longer required 2TB drive from the WHS.

That gives me 1TB of breathing space on both servers, plus a spare 2TB drive. All the data that needs to be more or less 24x7 will be duplicated on the WHS, and the directories I can manage without will be on the HP. If they go down, I'll stick the replacement 2TB drive in there and rebuild from backups, and put up with the downtime.

How hard can it be?!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by b0redom

Splash, do you have any performance stats on Openfiler vs FreeNAS? I really need to get off OpenSolaris asap, but I really do like the security blanket of ZFS.

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Sadly not - I have 5 disks in a RAID5 (it's a home lab box, not storing backups so if I lose the array during a rebuild it's not the end of the world) in there on Openfiler, and I only have one more 2Tb disk as a spare in case of failure. That said... if you let me know what you need benchmarking (filesystem comparisons, protocols, transfer types) I'm off work today and tomorrow - I can always rebuild to FreeNAS8 and do a compare and contrast for you.

EDIT - just moving the couple of VMs that I have stored on Openfiler so I can do this, this is going to take a couple of hours I think

Quote:

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Originally Posted by snootyjim

If I was going to do it, it would definitely be clustered. All my backups of server data are offline for safekeeping, I don't have any live backup systems.

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not entirely sure what you mean here - from my understanding of what you need then replicating the data from one server to another using a scheduled rsync would seem to be pretty much exactly what you need.

Quote:

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However, I've decided that I'm definitely not going to. To cut a long story short, all my data is built up of separate major directories, which are at most 2TB each. Since there's no major difference between \\server\media and \\servermedia\, unless a directory grows larger than the maximum capacity of a server, it doesn't seem worth investing any time or effort in creating massive file servers. If the HP server can hold 9TB of data at the most, that's probably a very long time away. And by then we'll have larger hard drives anyway.

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With the extra info that you give this seems like a very sensible move. Note that my statement of 9Tb being the maximum storage was made up based on 5 3Tb disks with a RAID6 array setup - RAID5 would give you 12Tb (before overheads), and if/when we have 4, 5 or 6 Tb disks obviously the calculation would be affected.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Splash

not entirely sure what you mean here - from my understanding of what you need then replicating the data from one server to another using a scheduled rsync would seem to be pretty much exactly what you need.

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You mean that if I had all of my data on a 6TB JBOD server, I could just sync it over to a second 6TB server and not bother with any RAID at all?

I get that, but surely that doesn't provide redundancy? If boxes are configured to look at \\servera\media for media files, how would they know to look at \\serverb\media if server a went down?

Quote:

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With the extra info that you give this seems like a very sensible move. Note that my statement of 9Tb being the maximum storage was made up based on 5 3Tb disks with a RAID6 array setup - RAID5 would give you 12Tb (before overheads), and if/when we have 4, 5 or 6 Tb disks obviously the calculation would be affected.

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Yeah. Considering these have been growing for about the last 5 years, and still only take up that much space, I don't think they would ever outgrow a 4/5 bay server.

Ok, I see what you mean now - I guess we were just looking at different uses for redundancy. I was talking purely from the data's point - if the first server failed then you could always rename the 2nd server and give it the ip of the first server but what you're talking about would certainly require clustering.

I've got offline backups I can use if the worst happens, I'm not too bothered about that.

Any redundancy via RAID/live backups would just be to prevent downtime. I'm anticipating about 5 PCs/network devices relying on certain data being available 24/7 so that's where it comes in useful.

HP do a lefthand networks Virtual Storage Appliance.
They use a system they call Network RAID - basically 2 seperate appliances in permanent sync as a cluster so sort of like RAID-1 - just everything is duplicated rather than just the disks.

I'm not sure there is a community version of the LeftHand VSA sadly :(

For anyone interested these are the stats I'm getting out of Openfiler

iSCSI

http://forums.hexus.net/members/spla...iscsi-4000.jpg

SMB

http://forums.hexus.net/members/spla...9-smb-4000.jpg


If I get the chance I'll build FreeNAS on the same box and disks so you have something to compare. Interestingly Jumbo Frames doesn't seem to want to play with the Microserver NIC under Openfiler - I set it and then check again and it's back to 1500...


EDIT - can't get the iSCSI target to work under FreeNAS8, but SMB performance (same benchmark, same hardware but obviously on ZFS rather than MDRAID)

http://forums.hexus.net/members/spla...8-smb-4000.jpg

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Splash

For anyone interested these are the stats I'm getting out of Openfiler

iSCSI


SMB


If I get the chance I'll build FreeNAS on the same box and disks so you have something to compare. Interestingly Jumbo Frames doesn't seem to want to play with the Microserver NIC under Openfiler - I set it and then check again and it's back to 1500...

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Are those stats for the Microserver?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by badass

Are those stats for the Microserver?

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Fraid so

Looks like it might be worth another look at Openfiler then.

I'm getting lower figures on freeNAS but it's not an apples to apples comparison to yours currently.
I'll not be benchmarking further until I can work out how to replace a dead drive on freeNAS 8.0 RC5.
It's currently a VM and I've simulated a drive failure by deleting the virtual HDD. I can't even see any evidence that FreeNAS has recognised it's missing yet. Until I can do that, I'm not adding another Virtual HDD TBH.

If you are looking at syncing data over the weekend, you could always see if windows DFS and its sync options would work for you? Not sure if it is included in WHS but certainly is in the standard full licenses of windows server.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by badass

I'm getting lower figures on freeNAS but it's not an apples to apples comparison to yours currently.
I'll not be benchmarking further until I can work out how to replace a dead drive on freeNAS 8.0 RC5.
It's currently a VM and I've simulated a drive failure by deleting the virtual HDD. I can't even see any evidence that FreeNAS has recognised it's missing yet. Until I can do that, I'm not adding another Virtual HDD TBH.

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The array's not flagged as degraded at all? Slightly concerning... My benchmarks are installed to a USB key, no hypervisor so you lose the slight overhead that would have. Not planning to do any more FreeNAS benchmarking as it takes bleedin' ages to build the array in Openfiler :). Also now that I'm happy with the reliability and performance of Openfiler I plan to start moving data to it for proper use.

I've dropped Freenas now and installed openfiler 2.99 on a VM
I've used the custom layout as part of the installation as per the how to on the openfiler site.
I've added 2 60GB Virtual HDD's to the openfiler VM (/dev/sdb and /dev/sdc)
I've created the Linux RAID array member partitions on both 60GB HDD's.
I've gone to software RAID, select RAID-1, click both disks, the add array button stops being ghosted, I click apply, wait and the array is never created.
If I try to create a RAID-0 array, it works.
At this rate, I'm just tempted to use Windows Server 2008 R2's NFS features TBH.

I'd be tempted to test the same scenario to see if it's limited to yourself Badass, but I'm still busy moving data at the mo. Will give it a shot in the morning, see if I can help you suss what's going on

My NAS

4 x 2TB in RAID 5

iSCSI

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b3.../nas-speed.png

and for giggles my SSD

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b3..._oasis/ssd.png

Guess i'll chime in.

SMB

http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/4292/captureijd.png

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

This is after some speed tweeks to Samba and Dm-raid. host is Ubuntu 10.10 Kern 2.6.35-28-server-amd64

Quote:

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Originally Posted by alsenior

guess i'll chime in.

Smb

http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/9610/capturetej.png

this is after some speed tweeks to samba and dm-raid. Host is ubuntu 10.10 kern 2.6.35-28-server-amd64

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raid 10?

nope raid 5 over 3 disks

very nice.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jay

very nice.

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did you see the update. Correct drive this time :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by alsenior

did you see the update. Correct drive this time :)

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Can you re-run your tests for SMB with 4GB files please?

We don't want cache getting in a way :)

Openfiler was giving me a bit of GPT related grief, so for the moment I've switched over to Server 2008 R2, just running a 3.7TB span for the moment. Hopefully that will do the trick until June when I'll have more time to re-jig everything.

Out of interest, which hardware RAID levels are supported out of the box by the N36L? Some of the material I found last night indicated it was only 0 and 1, which sounds a bit rubbish. Not necessarily surprising, but definitely a bit rubbish :p

Quote:

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Originally Posted by spoon_

Can you re-run your tests for SMB with 4GB files please?

We don't want cache getting in a way :)

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Any recommended benchmarks. Atto only goes up to 2 GB

Quote:

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Originally Posted by alsenior

Any recommended benchmarks. Atto only goes up to 2 GB

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That should be sufficient assuming your RAID doesn't have that much cache :P

Crystal Disk Mark seems like a good tool though.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by snootyjim

Openfiler was giving me a bit of GPT related grief, so for the moment I've switched over to Server 2008 R2, just running a 3.7TB span for the moment. Hopefully that will do the trick until June when I'll have more time to re-jig everything.

Out of interest, which hardware RAID levels are supported out of the box by the N36L? Some of the material I found last night indicated it was only 0 and 1, which sounds a bit rubbish. Not necessarily surprising, but definitely a bit rubbish :p

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Correct. RAID-0 and RAID-1 only.
You cannot use the onboard RAID with Vmware ESXi but it does wirk with it in AHCI mode.

Okay, great. I was mulling over a hybrid RAID 10 of some sort, hence the question, but I think I'm going to go for a RAID 6, as originally suggested by yourself and splash.

RAID 0 was making me feel edgy, so I bit the bullet and bought a stack more hard drives to get RAID 6 going.

If you're wondering about Linux software RAID performance:
http://ompldr.org/vOGk1OQ/Raid5%20Reads.png

That's RAID5 over 3x2TB WD Blacks.

Running the following:
Windows XP workstation<--->ESXi4.1<--->iSCSI<--->Windows Server 2008 R2 iSCSI Target on sincle vCPU<--->Software (2008 R2) Mirrored pair of EagerZeroedthick 25 GB disks<--->HDD's in the server itself Via ESXi4.1U1

Sequential:
Read: 20MB/sec
Write: 20MB/sec
512K Random: the same
4K random read/write ~0.3 MB/Sec

Replace the Server 2008 R2 and iSCSI with FreeNAS and NFS
Sequential:
Read: ~30MB/sec
Write: ~17MB/sec
512K Random ~same as above
4K random read/write: Around 1MB/Sec

Replace the Server 2008 R2 and iSCSI with Nexentartor 3.0.0 community and NFS
Sequential:
Read: ~30MB/sec
Write: ~30MB/Sec
512K random: as above
4k random read/write: around 4MB/Sec. I suspect the ARC was really kicking in there.

Openfiler was showing more like Nexentastor figures.


Problems
Nexentastor:
3.0.0:
Downloaded the virtual appliance.
Using IE8 to access the web interface crashes the whole appliance, takes the disks offline and it sometimes loses data. This is a known bug it seems
Performance was very variable. Using Storage Vmotion was often enough to crash the appliance, taking all disks offline. They usually reappeared a while after it had failed. Could also cause the appliance to lose data.
Tried updating via internet. Didn't work.
Downloaded 3.0.4 and tried to update. Had to mess around with text files and work a whole load of pointless stuff out so did a fresh install to a new VM.
Went through setup, went to config webpage and got some stupid proxy error. Seems not uncommon based on their own forums.
At this point, I decided it was just so unbelievable poorly made I couldn't be bothered trying to fix this broken product any further.

FreeNAS 8.0RC5
Simulated a drive failure to test a ZFS mirror on it.
Everything worked fine but there was no way to tell the drive had failed. Gave up.

Openfiler 2.99:
Couldn't even create a mirror. Was fine to create RAID-0 but that wasn't what I wanted. Gave up.

Windows Server 2008 R2
Seems to work OK. Haven't tested drive failure yet. Really easy to set up. Performance very poor.


Apologies for the completely unscientific setup. I have been doing this with limited time and with optimisation, I'm sure the figures can be much higher. Using SMB on Nexentastor, a large file trnasfer started at 4MB/sec, then kept climbing until it hit over 50MB/sec. Also, I was so annoyed at Nexentastor and the huge amount of time spent trying to work around the extremely poor design/testing I had little patience with the other options. I'm sure if I had spent the time of FreeNAS or Openfiler that I had on Nexentastor, I would probably have a nice working system on either by now.

http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/7434/3driveraid5.png

This is a 3 drive raid 5 with slow ass seagate lp drives

http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/6160/5driveraid5.png

this is with 5 Wd-re2gp's

thats nuts. How can a 3 drive RAID 5 array get rates like that!

What switch are you using?

I created mine with Ubuntu's installer, I believe it uses something like this: "mdadm --create /dev/md0 --metadata=0.90 -l5 -c64 -n3 /dev/sd{a,b,c}1".

I must be glutton for punishment. I'm downloading Freenas 8.0 release right now :undecided

Just as an FYI for those who have been watching this thread and kicking themselves for missing the deal: it's been extended (again!) until the end of May. (source)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jay

thats nuts. How can a 3 drive RAID 5 array get rates like that!

What switch are you using?

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nothing special. i just have gobs of cpu and ram to throw at it.

i used

Code:

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mdadm --create /dev/md1 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1

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i didnt even use the metadata flags or block size flags. everything is more of less defualt.

The mirror only shows as degraded after I've rebooted the VM.
You can only use the CLI to recover anything ZFS related. That then puts the GUI out of sync with what is actually happening.

What a waste of time....
Nexentastor 3.0.5 is out now but I can't be bothered to test it based on previous experience.

If I'm honest I'm considering a second microserver since I have a backdated payrise coming at the end of the month (27th), so I might do some further testing with Nexentastor: I'd really much rather have my VMs sitting on ZFS and might be tempted to have the current Microserver sat as second tier backup with the Samsung Ecogreen disks, and a new Microserver stuffed with WD Black Editions. I'm not exactly filled with confidence that FreeNAS will have fixed their messy iSCSI target setup in their gold release, but I *could* yet be tempted back to Nexenta if the disk dropouts have been fixed in 3.0.5.

We'll see, I guess.

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Originally Posted by Jay

thats nuts. How can a 3 drive RAID 5 array get rates like that!

What switch are you using?

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Are they tests done over the network trough? Run hdparm on your QNAP and compare...

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Originally Posted by badass

I must be glutton for punishment. I'm downloading Freenas 8.0 release right now :undecided

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That supports ZFS I believe - wonder if you'll have the same challenges with it.

of course it could just be a layer 8 issue and Nexenta is actually quite stable :P

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Originally Posted by Moby-Dick

That supports ZFS I believe - wonder if you'll have the same challenges with it.

of course it could just be a layer 8 issue and Nexenta is actually quite stable :P

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ZFS is the default storage used for FreeNAS 8

To be fair, I have *never* had a problem with ZFS. I have had problems with Linux RAID however. I am currently running Solaris 10 on Intel, however, so maybe that's why.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Moby-Dick

of course it could just be a layer 8 issue and Nexenta is actually quite stable :P

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It could be but then again I'm not the only one having all of the same problems :P

I've been testing WS2008R2 software RAID and the MS iSCSI client v3.3 and it's been rock solid but performance is pretty poor. Windows relies on the hardware for any sort of speedup.

removing/adding disks on the fly is picked up fine, although I'ts required manual intervention to trigger the rebuild of degraded arrays.