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FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

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Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#51

Post by ultramancool »

c0g wrote: post #49
ultramancool wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it for gaming? I'd imagine it's using a VM solution (Xen HVM or KVM so it can do IOMMU?). I've been avoiding it because I figure that VM solution would get detected by anti-cheat in many games (particularly the nasty kernel level ones like EasyAntiCheat, GameGuard, etc).

I have 8x2.8 ghz Xeon cores 32 GB of RAM and a 970 GTX in my gaming vm. Works perfectly for DOOM, Witcher 3, all at 1920x1080 on high settings (maybe not full but damn pretty). Consensus on the forum seems to be you lose low single digit performance. It's a KVM hypervisor and I haven't played online, why would they ban you for using a VM?

A VM makes it possible to arbitrarily read and modify memory from outside of the operating system in a way that the anti-cheat can't otherwise detect (heck, some VMs have full out integrated debuggers), so anti-cheat and DRM schemes used by games may disallow VMs.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#52

Post by dokument »

zwerdlds wrote: post #27
vibrolax wrote: post #19

FreeNAS has worked well for me for two years on a dedicated home NAS server I built with a mini-ITX motherboard. I chose DIY NAS over a NAS appliance like Synology's, because I can readily obtain a replacement for any hardware that fails into the indefinite future. I keep a copy of the FreeNAS's storage on a second DIY NAS running NAS4free, which is the original base from which FreeNAS was forked some years ago. One…

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.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#53

Post by Something1234 »

FireBeyond wrote: post #13

I do love FreeNAS, at home and at the office too (for development purposes - I'd trust it for production but with our client base it's better to be more "corporate"). It has a good cross section of features from 'home' to 'pro', AFP/NFS/CIFS/iSCSI, directory integration, plugins (more aimed at home, with things like news downloaders, BT clients).

What do you use instead of zfs in production?

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#54

Post by dragontamer »

NAS4Free > FreeNAS.

Start your flamewars nerds!

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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 it is based on FreeBSD, you need to be somewhat careful about hardware choices, although in my experience FreeBSD seems to support hardware that I'm interested in.

* FreeNAS -- ZFS-based. Forked from Nas4Free and name-shenanigans happened. Newer web-gui and more plugins. Can't speak too much about it, since I haven't played with it.

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* Windows Storage Spaces -- Windows8 and up have ReFS + Storage Spaces as their ZFS-competitor. Runs a daemon in the background to automatically check for bitrot (unlike NAS4Free / FreeNAS where you need to schedule a cronjob). Comes as part of Windows, if building a dedicated system you need to pay the $100 Windows Tax. Best hardware compatibility available. No head-scratching about random AMD A10 / FM2+ motherboards with obscure drivers (FM2+ compatibility is not listed on FreeBSD yet)... you know everything has Windows compatibility.

Windows Storage Spaces are superior technologically to ZFS IMO. You can extend a storage space after building it, while ZFS volumes are locked to a specific size. (You can add more drives to a ZFS mirror, but this only increases reliability). Start with 2-hard drives and then extend the storage space to 6-drives later.

You can stripe data to increase a ZFS pool size, but this doesn't keep the same level of reliability. The Windows Storage Space methodology where you overpromise on storage size (and then later build out capacity) just seems to be an easier methodology to work with in the long term.

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ZFS has more features, but nobody uses them. ZFS supports dedup, but all documentation I've seen says its not worth it.

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

Windows ReFS does not. ReFS is also not a complete solution. Parity is implemented at the "Storage Space" level, not at the filesystem level. I don't think this is a major downside, but it is important to note that ReFS + Storage Spaces is the complete solution. (Whereas ZFS stands alone)

Note: Snapshots (Called 'Shadow Copies' in Windows land) exist on NTFS.

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* Synology -- Out-of-the box systems, usually built on Intel Atom. I find that the 2-disk options are cheap, but the 4-bay or 6-bay options are outrageously expensive. I can definitely build a cheaper WINDOWS system than most 4-bay Synology Box.

Synology is mostly a soft-RAID setup. I don't see much on bitrot or other storage issues. I hope they handle it? But I'm not 100% sure.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#55

Post by jdhawk »

ibelimb wrote: post #7
nugget wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you run DSM on non-synology hardware?

Supposedly Xpenology[0] lets you do that. I have not used it personally, as I have actual Synology hardware. [0] http://xpenology.org/

Yes, on x86 systems it mimics a DS3615. I've seen it installed on cheap dell desktops, like an optiplex 755.

Works well, with some limitations. I dont think their automatic port forwarding service (quickconnect) works well - since that service checks for a valid Synology MAC address.

Additionally - you can't do the automatic system updates as it might break certain portions that XPEnology overrides.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#56

Post by gmfawcett »

FireBeyond wrote: post #40
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…

Give your computer ECC memory. Configure ZFS to scrub data regularly. It can be configured to email you of impending (SMART) or actual failure. You can label drives by ID/SN, or if your chassis or controller supports it, it can blink to tell you what drive to replace. It can be configured with a hot spare so the "resilver" starts immediately on failure detection, not "when you happen to fix".

Let me add that you really want to have a hot spare, and if you can't do that (e.g. no extra bay in the chassis), then you should not delay on replacing a failed disk. Have a spare disk on hand, and take the time to replace it ASAP.

We lost everything on a FreeNAS system once because we were alerted to a failed-disk error, but decided to wait until the next week to replace it. But then a second disk failed, and we lost the storage pool. Lesson learned!

But this was an operator error, not a system problem. FreeNAS has been tremendously stable and reliable for us.

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#58

Post by baruch »

cbsmith wrote: post #41
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…

So many levels to this. Drives themselves remap sectors to handle bad sectors, and some have integrated ECC bits... there are also things at the sensor level to help recover from errors. Once you are at the block level, you have simple parity checking with some redundancy models, but the good ones use ECC bits. Usually this is done at the block device layer, but ZFS and some other filesystems do this at the filesyste…

An HDD/SSD without ECC will not work, and wouldn't have worked for a long time now. Many of the reads performed will require some ECC use.

ECC is always written alongside the actual block and the overhead for ECC is the reason for the move from 512b sectors to 4Kb sectors in HDDs. For SSDs the data is already written in different block sizes depending on the NAND and the internal representation and ECC is done for larger than 512b units.

The probability of failure during rebuild is not really directly linked to drive size, the usual interpretation of the drive BER is wrong (media BER is stated across a large population of drives rather than just one drive).

Re: FreeNAS: Open Source Storage Operating System

#59

Post by dragontamer »

josteink wrote: post #50
BrainInAJar wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's ZFS backed, screwing up the RAID is going to be pretty close to impossible. you can lose the system disk (usb key) that holds your settings, but the data you actually care about will be safe.

> 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.

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