Trusty old NAS4Free Server died on overfill

[Desertsweeper]

I built the beautiful thing many years back and just never touched it - it has run flawlessly now for longer than I can remember. And of course why touch what works right...

5 x 6GB WD Red's in a little HP Proliant N36L in RAID5 that boots of a USB stick running 9.2.0.1 - Shigawire (revision 972)
Was copying a large 4K video file to it from my GoPro when the copy bombed out and my pc lost the file-share.
Connected a monitor to the box in my store and it was doing a data verify - ran for about 36 Hours and finished with "Complete". Plugged in a Keyboard and type "Reboot" and it rebooted...but fails to start. See attached image:

2019-06-14 11.15.59.jpg

I believe the image does not
I am guessing that I maxed the storage out. If only I could boot it and delete something...any suggestions? I do have an identical second box that I turn on once a month and slurp all my data onto - as a backup - so I am not destroyed, but would lose several weeks of awesome extreme biking footage that I would love to recover...When I look at the backup box I see that indeed it as almost reached full capacity so I tipped the master unit over the edge in the last few weeks

[raulfg3]

sorry, edit your post, no screenshot atached.


PD: Do you have a previosly saved config.xml file?

[Desertsweeper]

Yes I figured the screenshot was not showing - but now I think it's there. I have nothing at all - built this box I guess about 6 years back. I have the original 9.2.0.1 CD I used to install them at the the time - if that is of any use?

[Desertsweeper]

OK so reading through old threads it seems I need to create a new boot USB and import my array and then try to delete some files....here we go

[Desertsweeper]

I booted off the original CD I used to install the USB stick so it is the exact same version. I set an IP address and was able to login. I went to Disks>Management>Clear Config and Import Software Raid Disks.
The table shows my 5 drives ada0 through ada4. The FileSystem column shows SofRaid for all but disk ada1 that states: "Unknown or unformatted"
It definitely completed the rebuild-verify after it crashed
Do I proceed with it in this condition (I assume it i has degraded)?

[raulfg3]

software raid disk have less use, please wait until some guru answer your questions.

[Desertsweeper]

I shut it down, booted it up again and retried. This time it nly brings in the 4 active disks. When I try to mount it gives an error. Since I have 4 out 5 drives in RAID5 I should be able to get my data...so long as I don't lose another.
Can anyone tell me how to do the FSCK on a RAID5 array drive that cannot be mounted (I get: Filesystem is not clean - run fsck)?
I have attached the log file

[cookiemonster]

You might want to try this viewtopic.php?t=11543
And googling "GEOM_RAID5 fsck" seems to get some hits.

[Desertsweeper]

It has been a fairly long journey but I finally recovered ALL my data. Which is good news. I figured lesson-learned and wiped the Raid5 array (or what was left of it anyway) and set up the same 5 disks using ZFS. That is after doing a thorough smart test on each of them - passed no issues. But now I go to restore my data to the NAS and it is way slower than before. And I see the CPU is maxed out. I did the whole 4K nop thing I read about, so the WDRED 6GB drives are NOT .nop and I have 16GB of ECC Ram already installed. Is my HP Microserver just not up to the job of ZFS? It has a Dual-core AMD Athlon 2.2 Ghz CPU. It flew under RAID-5 - easily getting 80+ MB/S on write, of large video files with low CPU utilization. Now it maxes out at around 55 MB/s with CPU at 90% plus. Do I go back to RAID-5?

[ChriZathens]

FWIW, my backup NAS (see sig) is steady above 75 MB/s
And it is definitely lower on specs than yours
Some tuning may be needed

[Desertsweeper]

Thank you for your reply, could the better rate be that you are running a Mirror while I am using 5 drives? Any pointers to a document as to how I can "tune" it?

[raulfg3]

revise tune-up section: viewforum.php?f=10

[ChriZathens]

Thank you for your reply, could the better rate be that you are running a Mirror while I am using 5 drives? Any pointers to a document as to how I can "tune" it?

I am not running mirrors, but RaidZ (equivalent to Raid5)
However I missed at your signature the fact that you have a N36L microserver. I actually saw your post about the 2.2 GHz CPU (N36L has a 1.3 GHz CPU actually) and I thought you had the N54L, which is indeed faster than my N40L
So, after all, this would explain my better speeds, however do keep in mind that I have done no tuning at all, which would potentially yield even better speeds
It is my backup machine, however, so don't really care..
Do take a look at the topic Raul pointed out.
I doubt you will manage to max out a Gbit network, but I do believe you can get better than 55 MB/s, especially since you have plenty of RAM.

[Lee Sharp]

How are you doing your copy? For example, rsync is a pig and will slam a lot of hardware. Especially rsync over ssh with an advanced encryption! But that is not indicative of true performance.