HP MicroServer + FreeNAS = #WIN
We use this setup in small businesses all the time when a dedicated NAS device is not used or preferred. The options are simple and the ACL and other advanced options are great.
Won't bother listing the pros of FreeNAS as you can read about them, but comparing it next to other dedicated NAS devices, you have more control and options. For example when you run a HUGE setup like what we do for some clients where we image/clone all the business machines nightly or weekly depending on the case so that if a drive fails or an update crashes the machine, we can bring them up in under an hour, and having more RAID options to pick from like ZFS for example can really be great to prevent data corruption if you also keep backup of important documents for years and never touch them.
Yes, that was a big huge run on sentence.
We use this setup in small businesses all the time when a dedicated NAS device is not used or preferred. The options are simple and the ACL and other advanced options are great.
Won't bother listing the pros of FreeNAS as you can read about them, but comparing it next to other dedicated NAS devices, you have more control and options. For example when you run a HUGE setup like what we do for some clients where we image/clone all the business machines nightly or weekly depending on the case so that if a drive fails or an update crashes the machine, we can bring them up in under an hour, and having more RAID options to pick from like ZFS for example can really be great to prevent data corruption if you also keep backup of important documents for years and never touch them.
Yes, that was a big huge run on sentence.
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dano
New Member
I have used it in small office environments and other environments for awhile. I personally think freenas needs plenty of memory if your doing or planning on using deduplication(otherwise not as much), and would recommend using enterprise drives, as I have personally had lots of issues using cheap desktop drives with lots of IO from nfs/cifs shares, with panics that required hard resets.
The plan is to use a Microserver. Not sure on the drives yet but prolly go with greens or maybe seagates.
It literally is just for storage so everyone in the office can access the files and then for user storage and the ability to generate backups/snapshots.
It literally is just for storage so everyone in the office can access the files and then for user storage and the ability to generate backups/snapshots.
Go with WD REDS or a NAS/RAID based drive if you plan to run RAID or want reliability in the storage. It's not a big big deal but if you read into the fine details, terms like ERC (Error Recovery Control), CCTL (Command Completion Time Limit), and TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) and some others will come up depending on the drive manufacture.
I've done desktop drives in FreeNAS for fun but I wouldn't trust them in production.
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True, true. But there are always those who come in from Google searching and now they will leave learning something and a community/thread hopefully bookmarkedPreaching to the choir there
dano
New Member
We had been using WD Black drives, and had fine performance and not a single issue during high IO(for a couple of years) -- when we moved to 3tb Seagate Constellation disks on our platform, nothing but problems. If you have a caching device, you maybe able to get around the issues we saw, but I would just stick with good, proven disks for ZFS arrays, like others have said, red drives, black drives work fine, Seagate disks from that family I wouldn't trust personally.
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All of the HP Microservers I've seen are at least $350.
dano
New Member
Just checked the specs on the Microserver from HP -- for me, I have concerns for you with the latest FreeNAS versions, as it's such a memory eater, compared. We have 16gb of mem and dual L5420s on the machine I have talked about, and with versions 8.x-8.2 of Freenas, we had no memory issues. Once we switched to 8.3, memory usage went from 8-10gb used, to all 16gb used - upgrading to version 9 was the same story(no dedup at this point).
With the HP Microserver only able to handle 8gb of Mem, I would say to leave dedup disabled, and also to think about using a slightly older version of Freenas, or possibly even another distro at this point. I understand your machine will be newer than my situation, but it's still going to be running tight on resources, especially in a multi terabyte system.
With the HP Microserver only able to handle 8gb of Mem, I would say to leave dedup disabled, and also to think about using a slightly older version of Freenas, or possibly even another distro at this point. I understand your machine will be newer than my situation, but it's still going to be running tight on resources, especially in a multi terabyte system.
You can do 16GB RAM in the HP Micro servers but requires BIOS patching in some cases.
Newegg every now and again will let you grab them for around $250-280 and throw in a free 2TB drive. =)
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Never, ever. Wouldn't trust it on anything, they die very easy and that auto power-off is very annoying and the only way to bypass is a script to read write to the disk every so often which is stupid.
tchen
New Member
Did wdidle3 stop working on the new batches?