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FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

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Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#141

Post by pixl97 »

dragontamer wrote: post #54

NAS4Free > FreeNAS. Start your flamewars nerds! -------------- I actually have only used Nas4Free. I know that FreeNAS is technically the fork (despite having the original name), but the technology IMO is quite solid. Its important to know all of the competition however. Here's a basic overview of the technologies: * Nas4Free -- ZFS-based. Free as in beer and Free as in OSS. More barebones and simple than FreeNAS. As…

>I guess one important feature ZFS has is that it supports L2ARC / ARC caching for SSD Acceleration.

Which can massively accelerate small file load times. Using this on a VM pool greatly speeds things up.

>Also ZFS has compression which can drastically reduce data usage.

Which in some virtual environments decreased our data usage by 50 times or more.

Windows storage spaces suck balls on speed. Using it in the Microsoft recommend methods to avoid data loss or corruption make it even slower.

Oh, and just throwing files on ReFS and using it directly with services and such is a great way to get weird issues if you don't understand the filesystem are different.

>while ZFS volumes are locked to a specific size

Specific number of disks. You increase the disks size and you can grow you raid.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#142

Post by fnj »

dragontamer wrote: post #59
josteink wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's ZFS backed, screwing up the RAID is going to be pretty close to impossible Even if it's ZFS it can get quite messed up if you set it up based on sda, sdb, etc like naming conventions. In that case entire zpools can fail to import in case of failure. Therefore the best practice is to use device-by-id, so that if a device like sda falls out, the rest of your array should still resolve correctly. And how the arra…

You're freaking me out. As soon as I get home, I'm going to swap some of my HDD cables and see what happens... I've basically been assuming that NAS4Free uses device-by-id like any sane OS should.

NAS4Free and FreeNAS are just relabeled FreeBSD with GUI stuff pasted on. FreeBSD doesn't have /dev/disk/by_{id,label,partuuid,path,uuid}. It's its biggest failing IMO. Their /dev/diskid is NOT what it sounds like.

That said, ZFS pools under FreeBSD and derivatives, just as under linux, are imported from info stored on the drives themselves. They should be able to reboot after scrambling the cables. It would take more nerve, or craziness, than I've got to PROVE that using any pools I care about.

However, I have completely screwed a ZFS replace command in FreeBSD following a bad drive in a RAID-Z3 pool. It dutifully replaced a perfectly good drive with my new drive. But no harm was done to the pool. After it finished, I ran another zfs replace, replacing the bad drive with the "mistake" old drive. It all worked!

ZFS is so brilliant, be careful or it will put your eyes out :-)

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#143

Post by fnj »

dragontamer wrote: post #54

NAS4Free > FreeNAS. Start your flamewars nerds! -------------- I actually have only used Nas4Free. I know that FreeNAS is technically the fork (despite having the original name), but the technology IMO is quite solid. Its important to know all of the competition however. Here's a basic overview of the technologies: * Nas4Free -- ZFS-based. Free as in beer and Free as in OSS. More barebones and simple than FreeNAS. As…

Both FreeNAS and NAS4Free are nothing more than FreeBSD with some GUI stuff pasted on. I am comfortable using ssh and [ba]sh, so I couldn't care less about the GUI. I just use the real thing: FreeBSD.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#144

Post by Fzzr »

dokument wrote: post #52
zwerdlds wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention, the jails system in FreeNAS has been in flux in the past. It never quite worked well for me, so offloading the "app" stuff to a workhorse is what I did.

I believe they are replacing jails with docker containers.

Both docker containers and bhyve VMs.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#145

Post by digler999 »

jzelinskie wrote: post #21
tracker1 wrote: post #8

Although I don't think I'd ever DIY another NAS box, I would suggest the following, use a common chipset controller that exposes each drive/device separately with all information, some don't. Also, prefer a system with ECC, Asus supports ECC on most AMD FX supporting motherboards for the less expensive option there. Also, have 2 spare drives on hand. I went back to Synology after my uper-nas crashed and burned (reall…

I wanted to do something like this, but after reading about the failure rates of drives and raid, once one disk fails, it seems like you're fucked. Anybody got some stories or numbers that prove that while repairing my raid for one disk failure I won't just destroy the rest of my drives?

I don't know if this has been mentioned yet in the conversation, but it's very important to know that raid is _not_ a backup. You still need some kind of backup solution even with a RAID system.

if you want to learn more about this topic, come on over to www.reddit.com/r/datahoarder and read and ask about it. We're friendly.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#146

Post by voltagex_ »

pixl97 wrote: post #140
voltagex_ wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed a massive write performance hit when I enabled this. Note that it'll only compress data after you enable it, it isn't retroactive

What CPUs do you have in your box? In most modern systems the rate at which the CPU can compress data is many, many times faster than the disk can write data. In general compression greatly increases write speeds because less disk IO is needed. The vast majority of benchmarks show that to be the case too. TL:DR, if you notice a performance decrease after enabling compression, something is wrong with your NAS/SAN. Tha…

Thought that might be the case - it's an Atom C2758 on a SuperMicro board.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#147

Post by voltagex_ »

ldehaan wrote: post #109
allendoerfer wrote: post #32

Storage is a really weak area of mine, but it is important, and I do not see much technical discussion here anyway, so I am going to expose myself: How does integrity protection work in practice? I know that the bits on the HDD itself do not map one to one to bits you can actually use and that it uses that to protect us from flipped bits. I know that beyond that RAID/RAIDZ is supposed to help. I guess redundancy alon…

if you intend to try this, I would recommend getting spinrite at grc.com, and run it a couple times every year, if you're going to be doing a lot of io on it. I run it on all my hdd's and its kept them alive and running smoothly for years at a time.

http://serverfault.com/questions/51681/does-spinrite-do-what...

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#148

Post by barrystaes »

zzzcpan wrote: post #105
takeda wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let me get this straight: running a cluster of swift/gluster/ceph is less maintenance greedy than a single box?

Than a single traditional NAS box, yes. EDIT: Let me explain a bit more: once you start running a distributed system you stop caring about OS, filesystem and disk level issues, because you have redundancy on another level. And it makes all the difference. You don't worry anymore, you can always just reboot, hard-reset or take a node out to investigate. Suddenly you realize that it's not a big deal even if some node s…

If dont want to care for the OS, who do you expect to keep it in check? Someone has to worry about it: you can try and abstract it away and minimize it but its never gone.

I see this line of thought that somehow self-hosted "clouds"/clusters look after themselves, but thats usually not the case.

You'd come close by buying QNAP or Synology hardware, they provide software updates (including OS). Even buying software solutions like Unraid. I dont know how maintainable FreeNAS is for someone who doesnt want to worry about OS tho..

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#149

Post by riprowan »

These offerings work well as a pure NAS - your data is backed up and available.

Where they fall down for me as a home user is in their inability to offer other services. For example, photo sharing. I have a fast home internet connection and all my photos are already on the NAS. But the photo sharing capabilities are very, very weak; so inevitably I have to use another service (ie Google Photos, Dropbox, Flickr) if I want to make those photos available to myself and others while away.

The same goes for other forms of media sharing, self-hosted email, etc.. The boxes offer these things - and the appeal is obvious to the end-user - but the potency is so weak as to be essentially unusable.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#150

Post by NeutronBoy »

pixl97 wrote: post #138
NeutronBoy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used ZFS in two production instances a few years ago on Solaris, and had two instances of a bug that totally corrupted the superblock on each drive, meaning that all data was gone with no way to recover. Now I'm back to HW RAID, LVM, and ext4, which works a treat, and I'll be using that until I have more faith in ZFS.

Wait till you have a HW raid silently write bad data. Nothing is safe.

At least I know what my options are to recover from that. When I tried to resolve my ZFS issues, no tools existed to try help recover because it wasn't a failure mode that had been considered as an option apparently.
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