XigmaNAS

Hello everyone...
I was browsing through my pictures taken via my phone and just saw my NAS picture. so I thought that since I've never posted any pictures of my NAS, It is a good time to do so, loll
Anyways, posting just one picture for now ( I will post more in the future)
My N4F server specs are posted in my signature.. More details :
1. Case: Fractal Design Define R2

Heavy case, because of the noise insulation, but very quiet. It can host 8 3.5" disks and has an adapter in the top 5.25" slot to fit an SSD or a 2.5" HDD. Had bought it about €85
2. Motherboard: MSI GF615M-P33. I bought it about 3 years ago when I wanted to create a NAS. It was cheap, about €45, has 4 onboard SATA ports and supports RAID 1, 0, 5 (never used the RAID capabilities, though, since I use SoftRaid5)
3. PSU: Chieftec 850w modular. An overkill for my system, but it's OK. Cost: €130
4. AMD Athlon II X240 @ 2800MHz. It was cheap (about €65) and that time considered fast enough and not very power consuming
5. RAM: 2x1GB adata DDR3 modules (Cost: €25)
6. Hard Disks: For the O/S I am using an old IBM Travelstar 30GB ancient Fujitsu 6GB 2.5" IDE HDD which I had from an old laptop. It is fitted in the 5.25" bay for the SSD. Now for the data: I had initially bought 4x1.5TB disks (2xSAMSUNG HD154UI and 2xSeagate ST31500541AS). Their Cost €340. Configured them SoftRaid5. They were out of space fast (1 year IIRC) , since I already had a lot of data in external disks which were moved to my NAS. I then bought another 4 2TB Samsung HD204UI. Cost: €360. Configured them SoftRaid5, toο. In order to connect them to the M/B, since It has only 4SATA ports, I also bought:
7. 3xPromise S150 TX4 SATA Controllers (€68 from ebay). I only use one, the other 2 are spare
8. O/S: NAS4Free 9.0.0.1.175 -amd64 full NAS4Free 9.1.0.1.457 -amd64 full (Been trying to find time to upgrade for about a month, but haven't found any yet).
9. In order to connect the O/S 2,5" IDE HDD also bought 2xIDE 2.5" to 3.5" adapters (one to use, one spare). Cost: €18

10. A Skythe Ninja CPU cooler and a few extra silent blowers. Total cost €60
11. (EDIT) Forgot to add that case had a fan controller which can control 3 fans. I have added another 5,25" fan controller in order to control all 5 fans.

Total Cost of the project: about €1200

This is a picture of the final build: As you can see it is inside a wooden locker together with my linux downloader and a UPS. This picture was taken last time I upgraded. The open side is normally in the back and the cables are there only to manage to take console in order to upgrade. In normal conditions the only cables attached are the power and the ethernet cable. So I need to do a bit of a moving in order to upgrade, because in its normal position the VGA cable is not long enough to reach the monitor, hence the additional time I need if I want to upgrade.
As you can see I am not that good in cable management. The HDD cables could be on the back side of the disks and the situation in the front would be more tidy, but I connected them on purpose this way, so that If needed I could remove an HDD without having to remove both side panels of the case.
I will post more pictures as soon as possible.. I hope you like my build. Any suggestions/questions welcome.

Good case , and good components, only a dude, why do you use Raid5 instead RaidZ1?

Do you know that Forums are full of users with troubles with Raid5?

Yes, raul, unfortunately I know..
But this machine was created about 3 years ago using Freenas. Freenas had older -and If I remember not very stable - versions of ZFS. So I went with RAID5 arrays. By the time N4F came I already had about 6TB of DATA, so converting to ZFS will need to backup my data somewhere. I don't have 3-4 2TB external disks to do so..
So my options are:
1. Build a new NAS to do this.
2. Use my extra Promise SATA Controller, buy 4x3TB HDDs, create a RAIDZ1 and then move data of one of my raid5 arrays. Then destroy this raid5 array, create with it a second raidz1 with and copy there the files from the other raid5 array. Then leave 4 disks unused
3. Move the data of only one of my raid5 arrays, create a raidz1, move data back. And do the same for the second raid5 array.

My above options require either much time or much money (a wise thing would be to disregard my 4x1.5TB disks and replace them with 4x3TB to increase space. This means paying €600 for 4 3ΤΒ disks)
And I have neither free time, nor €600 to spent for Hard disks at the moment, I am afraid..
The transition to ZFS is something I have in mind for quiet a while now, though, so as soon as I will be able to, I will do it..

Very nice
But when I calculate transfer time for 9T over network....

Lol, yes...
I currently have 7.5TB of data..
I can probably ommit about 1TB, but there will still be around 6.5TB..
Sending them to USB disks the transfer speed will be max at 22MB/s will need approx. 4 days of non stop transfer.
Which you can't do non stop - last time I tried to transfer about 500GB to a cousin's - brand new - external hard drive, it caused it to overheat and almost crashed..
Then I had to create a script which copied about 50GB, paused the process for 10 minutes to cool the disk and then continue, lolll
Even if I transfer to another NAS via my Gigabit network, which transfers at 60MB/s, I will still need about 2 days to do so...
Conclusion: Migrating to ZFS will be a painful task...

Try over network - it faster than usb-disk.
And use rsync for transfer - it know reconnect and continue from where it stopped

NFS is much faster then Samba. Most time over NFS i got more then 110mb/sec

To simplify - have you attempted tarballing folders with the --lzma option? Then the backup location would need to be drastically smaller.

I haven't tried to do anything yet, since I will first need to create / find a new place to put the backup, lol
But tarballing so many TB of data isn't it time consuming, too?
Plus, won't I need additional space to put the tarballed files in the current NAS, before sending them to the backup destination???

I think about buying an HP N40L Microserver in the next days...
My plan is to also buy 4x3TB disks and somehow (I must think of that) manage to swap them with my small disks (4x1.5TB) without loosing data...
I think I will need to create a new pool with the 4x3TB disks, then move the data from the 4x1.5TB disks there, create the 4x1.5TB as raidz1, move back there the data.
Then do the same for my big raid5 (4x2TB)
Finally after my nas (see signature) is converted with 2 x raidz1 arrays start replacing the 1,5TB disks one-by-one with the 3TB disks. So at the end the 4.5TB will grow to 9TB.
Finally I will use the leftovers (4x1.5TB hdds) in the N40L
I have a question, though..Please those who now offer some insight..
Currently my 4x2TB disks are all connected to the motherboard's sata ports. This is a very fast array, so I use this array for my BD backups, who need speed due to the size of the files. The 4x1.5TB are connected using a PCI Sata Controller and the access there is slower (I guess due to PCI connection). I use this array mainly for small files, so lack of speed there is not important for me.
After converting the 4x1.5TB disks to 4x3TB, I would like to then disconnect them from the pci controller and connect them to the motherboard's sata ports and then use them for my bd backups.
Will zfs have a problem if I swap the disks connection?

ChriZathens wrote:After converting the 4x1.5TB disks to 4x3TB, I would like to then disconnect them from the pci controller and connect them to the motherboard's sata ports and then use them for my bd backups.
Will zfs have a problem if I swap the disks connection?

No, this is the magic of ZFS, you can interchange the SATA conector, or change the SATA controller, and ZFS still recognize the pool and mount it.

This is a relief to hear..
Thank you very much Raul!!!!

Out of an abundance of caution, I would recommend you export the pool before you move it to the new hardware location. Once reconnected after the move, a simple zpool import should do the trick.

Thanks a lot for the recommendation!
As a sidenote: Yesterday I received my new HP Proliant MicroServer N40L and 8GB Ram..
Haven't got the disks yet (almost €600 is not a cheap thing) but will experiment a bit using some -a lot - smaller disks that I have lying around...

I thought It is about time i posted an update regarding my N4F server.
For a while now I have successfully "converted" to ZFS. My two pools are as follows:

pool: Media
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub repaired 0 in 14h5m with 0 errors on Thu Oct 3 16:15:56 2013
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
Media ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada0.nop ONLINE 0 0 0
ada1.nop ONLINE 0 0 0
ada2.nop ONLINE 0 0 0
ada3.nop ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

pool: Media2
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub repaired 0 in 5h48m with 0 errors on Fri Oct 4 07:49:05 2013
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
Media2 ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz1-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
ada5.nop ONLINE 0 0 0
ada6.nop ONLINE 0 0 0
ada7.nop ONLINE 0 0 0
ada8.nop ONLINE 0 0 0

errors: No known data errors

This is the space I have:

Free disk space
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ufsid/52318d6b22867474 1.8G 267M 1.4G 16% /
devfs 1.0k 1.0k 0B 100% /dev
procfs 4.0k 4.0k 0B 100% /proc
/dev/ada4s2a 22M 12k 20M 0% /mnt/first
Media 3.9T 3.7T 234G 94% /mnt/Media
Media2 5.2T 4.3T 874G 84% /mnt/Media2

It is also worth mentioning that I have also installed the full OS in a 2GB industrial DOM
For the upgrade to ZFS 8GB DDR3 Ram has been purchased
This is the general system info: As you can notice from the uptime, I do not keep it on 24/7. I configured WOL and everytime I need it and i am not at home, I turn it on via wake on lan (as I did this morning)

Quick update on my system specs:
The Flash DOM died very soon... Have installed 9.1.0.1.847 x64 embedded on a spare usb stick
Also finally deleted all .nop devs to ommit unnecessary overhead.
A sata cable was also changed and a new WD Red 2TB was purchased, just in case...It was actually purchased because I initially thought one of my disks was dead, but it turned out to be the sata cable.
Costs 100 euro, but no worries, I now have a spare hdd in case one of my disks fails (they have been serving me for 4+ years)
My pools status now System info