| Morgan Jones on 17 Jun 2013 14:35:26 -0700 |
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| Re: [PLUG] FreeNAS vs. Debian for my simple home NAS |
Adam (and Lee), If your machine is 32 bit stay away from ZFS at least on FreeBSD. I went through a ton of pain on a P4 machine while experimenting with ZFS--it was intolerably unstable. I upgraded to a 64 bit i3 and all problems went away. As Lee said ZFS is memory hungry and works better with more. My ~4tb usable machine works fine with 4gb though. YMMV of course, mine is mostly serving timemachine backups, movies, photo archives and a simple vmware store. the big thing I've read is don't use de-dup unless you have a ton of memory. I had no end of problems with eSATA--drives would fall off and return seemingly at random. My hardware was commodity but reasonable quality commodity. SATA green drives have been no problem if on the slow side. ZFS will work with with a non-mirrored root disk and you can run it without mirroring or RAIDZ (their implementation of RAID5). You will still get snapshotting, dynamic re-sizing, replication etc. I would argue that you should use redundancy but certainly it works fine without it. putting root on zfs is *awesome*. I have a howto somewhere if you are interested. I'm not an LVM expert but I would say once you get the hang of it ZFS is miles beyond LVM in basically every way. ZFS will be fine (albeit perhaps overkill) with just 2 (or even 1) spindles. ZFS gives you the combined speed of both disks in a stripe or the speed of one disk in a mirror just like conventional raid. RAIDZ for 2 disks makes no sense in the same way RAID5 makes no sense for 2 disks. I run without read cache or ZIL and it works just fine. Though I have been meaning to try various levels of caching since watching what it does for performance at a recent devops presentation. I tried FreeNAS initially but found myself doing all of my configuration on the command line. I'm a tinkerer, didn't really want the gui anyway and was interested to learn ZFS so finally just installed FreeBSD which has been a fun diversion from Linux. -morgan On Jun 17, 2013, at 5:10 PM, Lee H. Marzke wrote: > My info below is based on NexentaStor community, FreeNAS is similiar. > > If you use the newer FreeNAS, it's based on ZFS. > > You want a LOT of RAM, perhaps 8G or more. The extra > RAM is used for ARC read cache. > > Not sure USB drives work, and they are slow. External drives > should be eSATA. HW RAID controllers need to be shut off as > ZFS is software RAID. > > ZFS requires a Mirror or RAID configuration. so with only > 2 drives ( RAID-Z2) you'll lose half your capacity. OK it may > not force you to mirror, but ZFS is designed assuming all your > vDEV's are at least two physical devices with optional spare. > > Note: A ZFS NAS is really designed for 2 boot disks and 8 data disks or more > with optional SSD for read cache and ZIL. If you try and run it > with low memory and 2 spindles, not sure how well that will work for you. > > I'd suggest sticking with non-ZFS solutions for this. > > > > > > > > From: "Adam Zion" <azion1995@gmail.com> > To: "PLUG" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> > Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 3:03:04 PM > Subject: [PLUG] FreeNAS vs. Debian for my simple home NAS > > OK, so I've got my roll-your-own NAS up and running like so: > • Ancient Dell Dimension (headless after I got everything up and running) > • Crunchbang Linux (Debian-based) > • SAMBA > • 2 1 TB USB2 drives (amazingly, the ancient Dell has USB2 ports) > • SAMBA shares on one of the USBs > • Nighly rsync copies from one drive to the other to make a de facto RAID 1 > Ain't pretty, and uses a lot more W of electricity than the Raspberry Pi-based NAS would have, but it works. > My question is: would there be any advantage to using FreeNAS (or NAS4Free) on this device vs. remaining w/Crunchbang? > -Z > -- > Adam+Zion, MSIS, MCSE+I > Registered Linux User #471910 > LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/azion1995 > ___________________________________________________________________________ > Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org > Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce > General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > > > > -- > "Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion..." - Kryptos > > Lee Marzke, lee@marzke.net http://marzke.net/lee/ > IT Consultant, VMware, VCenter, SAN storage, infrastructure, SW CM > +1 800-393-5217 office +1 484-348-2230 fax > +1 610-564-4932 cell sip://8003935217@4aero.com VOIP > > > ___________________________________________________________________________ > Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org > Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce > General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug