FreeNAS Server hardware

[janplank]

I want to turn my old computer scrap in a NAS server. I have a bunch of old ide hard drives. How many IDE controller cards can I use? Lets say I have 4 PCI slots, can I put 4 x Controller cards in thus having space for max 20hdd (including the on board IDE ports).

Will it work or will I be short of addresses or something? Will I have decent read write speeds considering all the cards.

 

[LazyLion]

I want to turn my old computer scrap in a NAS server. I have a bunch of old ide hard drives. How many IDE controller cards can I use? Lets say I have 4 PCI slots, can I put 4 x Controller cards in thus having space for max 20hdd (including the on board IDE ports).

Will it work or will I be short of addresses or something? Will I have decent read write speeds considering all the cards.

Should work just fine. There are some nice Linux distros out there that you can use for the software.

 

[Gnome]

I've setup a FreeNAS and Openfiler server. Currently I'm running OpenFiler but I'll be switching to FreeNAS soon to take advantage of RAID-z1 (parity). Just waiting for the new release..

Your speed will depend on the configuration, for example if you run the system with all the drives simply configured so that they are accessible over the LAN you will get the same speed as you would by using the hard-drives directly.

If like me tho, you run software RAID (on Openfiler I'm running RAID-5) or RAID-Z then you may become CPU limited on older hardware, if however you have a decent CPU and you run RAID-5/RAID-z1 (parity), you'll have better performance than single drive. My Openfiler box for example can reach nearly full speed on Gigabit LAN.

What does the hardware specs look like?

 

[janplank]

I am using freenas 0.7.2 Just getting to know the software. What is raid z1? I've got a intel pentium 1.7ghz cpu and 2.0gbz celeron. Duno witch will perform better though... 1gb Ram, 100mbit lan.

 

[alchamy]

Forgive any mistakes I make here still half in dream land but...

It depends how old the hardware is, you could have IRQ conflicts with IDE so just make sure you disable everything you won't use in the BIOS like com ports, printer ports, sound card, FLP.

Read/Write speeds are influenced by the following things in the order that they are likely become a bottleneck

Network Speed
CPU - RAID Calculations (see the 2nd last paragraph here)
HDD Speed (including IDE cards/cables etc)
PCI Bus

So if we make some assumptions ignoring overheads etc you should be able figure out what speeds you could reach.

You theoretical maximums are:

PCI 32bit is 133MB/s
ATA133 is 133MB/s

What network will you be using?

100BASE-T is 10MB/s
1000BASE-T is 100MB/s

How much CPU assuming SMB (Most taxing on FreeNAS)

10MB/s SMB is ~150-200Mhz CPU power.

Disclaimer: I completely ignored things like concurrency, burst vs sustained, read vs write and a few other important things.

 

[alchamy]

100mbit lan.

Then the cliff notes version of my reply is that your LAN will be a bottleneck and not PCI or HDD performance

 

[janplank]

so I can gladly put in a 1000mbit lan card too? even though my other devices are 100mbits, there wont be bottlenecking at the nas server side?

 

[hilton]

I did exactly what you want to do, use some old hardware lying around. Technically it will work but as I found out in the long run is that suddenly a rsync server job wouldn't run then other funnies like the server rebooting. This was my experience on two 'home built' NAS boxes.

The solution?

I bought two cheap HP ML110 servers and have never had a problem since then (a year ago now). YMMV.

 

[Messugga]

During the course of the weekend I formatted my Ubuntu-running Atom file server and stuck FreeNAS onto it. Copying from an external hard drive over gigabit LAN to the box, I easily maxed out the external hard drive's speed of ~37MB/s and the CPU was running at ~30% usage. I suspect that pretty much any processor made in the last 4 years or so, won't struggle at all with FreeNAS and short of fitting some RAID cards or running software RAID on a relatively weak processor, your bottleneck will be on the hard drive side of things.

 

[alchamy]

so I can gladly put in a 1000mbit lan card too? even though my other devices are 100mbits, there wont be bottlenecking at the nas server side?

Yup, and they are pretty cheap so nothing to worry about there just make sure FreeNAS (BSD) supports the NIC

 

[Gnome]

I am using freenas 0.7.2 Just getting to know the software. What is raid z1?

From Wikipedia:

RAID-Z

Sun's ZFS implements an integrated redundancy scheme similar to RAID 5 which is called RAID-Z. RAID-Z avoids the RAID 5 "write hole" by its copy-on-write policy: rather than overwriting old data with new data, it writes new data to a new location and then atomically overwrites the pointer to the old data. It avoids the need for read-modify-write operations for small writes by only ever performing full-stripe writes; small blocks are mirrored instead of parity protected, which is possible because the file system is aware of the underlying storage structure and can allocate extra space if necessary. There is also RAID-Z2 which doubles the parity structure to achieve results similar to RAID 6: the ability to sustain up to two drive failures without losing data. In July 2009, triple-parity RAID was added to OpenSolaris.

If this doesn't sound significant to you: The most mature RAID 5 software implementation now is GEOM RAID5, it can reach 80% of the *theoretical* transfer speed of all hard-drives attached (IE. if you have 5 hard drives you get the write speed of 80% of those 5 drives, I doubt even many hardware RAID controllers boast those figures but anyway). RAID-z is supposedly more efficient than this. On powerful hardware it would obliterate hardware RAID.

Both GEOM RAID5 and ZFS (Raid-z) are available on FreeBSD (FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD so naturally both are available) Neither are available on Linux so far as I know (definitely not ZFS because of licensing issues).

I've got a intel pentium 1.7ghz cpu and 2.0gbz celeron. Duno witch will perform better though... 1gb Ram, 100mbit lan.

Not really enough for anything other than JBOD (just a bunch of drives), IE. no redundancy. IRQs will only be a problem if you have a bunch of unnecessary devices enabled.
For example on my NAS I've disabled:
- Integrated Sound/Firewire, IDE, RAID controller, don't have a video card installed, don't have CD-ROM installed.

The only hardware detected is USB (from which the OS runs), SATA controller and memory controller + 4x2TB hard-drives.

 

[janplank]

Gnome, Thanks for the raid z description. It makes sense to me. About the old pc, It can boot from usb (usb-zip, usb-fdd, usb-cdrom and another one which I cant remember now) and freenas detects my usb when I insert it, but if I install to it and reboot, the machine doesn't boot. Is there any special format method I need to do before it can be bootable? I understand freenas formats the drive anyway and makes it own partitions. Any ideas here?

 

[Messugga]

Gnome, Thanks for the raid z description. It makes sense to me. About the old pc, It can boot from usb (usb-zip, usb-fdd, usb-cdrom and another one which I cant remember now) and freenas detects my usb when I insert it, but if I install to it and reboot, the machine doesn't boot. Is there any special format method I need to do before it can be bootable? I understand freenas formats the drive anyway and makes it own partitions. Any ideas here?

What setup method did you choose? If you want to install to a USB Flash stick, boot with the CD and only once the menu appears insert the flash stick. Failing to do this WILL result in the installation failing. Select embedded installation and go through the process. What threw me a bit was the fact that it didn't show progress, so I wasn't actually sure that the computer was doing anything. After a minute or two it wanted to reboot IIRC.

When you say the machine doesn't boot, what error message does it give?

 

[janplank]

I think I chose embedded. It first gave me errors. I formatted in windows and it worked again. it installed and came up with the options screen again. I removed the cd rom and rebooted. the pc just stopped where it said something like "boot : cd-rom" I have changed the boot priority in the bios to make sure it boot from usb first. but like I said, there are about 4 usb boot options.Not sure which one is the correct one, but tried them all.

 

[Gnome]

The embedded version just means that a compressed image of the entire OS is loaded into memory every time the computer boots. Any changes to the operating system are therefore lost on reboot. But configurations made VIA the web GUI are saved! (The config file is saved to permanent storage).

Embedded is the safest because you can't mess up the OS files, it's small, uses no swap space. It's also the only option you should use on a flash-drive. Flash-drives have limited writes, the embedded version doesn't write to the flash drive UNLESS you change configuration in the web GUI and then it's only a single small config file that is changed and saved.

The full install on the other hand creates a swap partition (IE. virtual memory), the swap partition will be subject to constant file reads/writes and therefore a flash-drive won't last very long if used for swap space. Full install allows changes to the underlying file system therefore it should only be used if you need to change some of the files or if you want to install external modules (IE. torrent box functionality and such).

NOTE: The only difference between Embedded and Full is: Full uses a swap partition and allows changes to the file system.

The CD-Rom is basically a embedded version without the ability to save config information. The best option is to get a flash, plug it in and install the embedded version to it USING the CD-Rom version.

Lastly most BIOS's require you enable Legacy USB support (specifically legacy USB storage device support) for it to boot from the USB. With that option enabled you should be able to boot from the USB. I have 3 PCs here at home, in all cases using the legacy setting my USB shows up as a hard-drive.

So try checking your hard-drive list and also try USB-HDD. Failing that you might have a boot menu when your computer POSTs (on a Asus motherboard it's usually F8 for the boot menu, on a Gigabyte usually F12). This boot menu isn't the OS (IE. Windows) boot menu it's the BIOS boot menu that allows you to select a boot device. Use that menu to figure out which device is the USB.