TravisW

When this is available I need 1 i have a ryzen in a pfsence box and a threadripper in a TrueNAS box that would let me hook a kvm to them without having to get another PCIE1 gpu card to be able to set them up or check whats going on when i cant get to the box.

Awesome. Thanks for in info i places it in the folder to replace the other one and it works great.

So i have this running on a Linux ubuntu 18.10 vm great the viewer is kinda awesome to watch. I then put this on my windows workstation with 2 xeons in it for 56 cores and a gtx 1080ti and the viewer is stuck in demo. I would sure like to peak in the viewer once and a while to see what it is doing but it wont connect for some reason. How do i fix this?

Day 1 of FreeNAS up and running on Threadripper 2920X. Parts: Rosewill 4U case 1000 watt older modular EVGA power supply Gigabyte x399 Aorus pro Threadripper 2920X Noctua NH-U12S TR4-SP3 GSKILL AEGIS DDR4 3000 MHz ram Slot 1 - LSI 9201-16i Slot 2 - LSI 9201-8i Slot 3 - Zotac GeForce GT710 pcie x1 Slot 4 - Intel X540T2 10Gig NIC Slot 5 - LSI 9201-16e FreeNAS on 2 SanDisk Ultra 16GB in UEFI (12) Micron 1100 2tb ssd RAIDZ (8) WD Red 4tb RAIDZ NetApp DS2246 24bau Disk Shelf (1) old 128 ssd (jails drive) will be moving it a 3 ssd raidz shortly Setup: Putting everything on the motherboard wasn’t hard. The board came with a nice connector deal to put all the power and reset button stuff into. I had downloaded and put the updated bios on a flash drive so that was number one thing that needed to be done. Then i set the video card to slot 3 so it would always go there first for video. Also turned on virtualization (that took some searching in the bios) and turned on the ram over clock so i would get 3000 MHz on my ram. Then once those settings were saved and i set the usb’s to be the first to boot i let the machine boot up. It did a initial boot to set all the settings from my previous build. Then rebooted and started up no problem. The previous build was bios boot and i had issues with reboot when i added a drive so i put in an old hard drive into the disk shelf let FreeNAS recognize it and show up in the web GUI. Then I restarted the machine. When i did that it tried to boot from that hard drive so i shut down the machine and used a virtual machine to “update” the flashdrives to be a UEFI boot drives and put them back in the server. I checked the BIOS to make sure that those were the first things to boot. And because they were a UEFI drive they are automatically the first things on the list. Again it did the initial boot deal and then startup no problems. I’m happy to say it is running great. 24 hours no issues with running anything. Quirks: No temperature read out for the cpu The system doesn’t actually shutdown i have to give the command wait a minute or 2 then hold down the power button to get it to shut off. The Noctua NH-U12S is a hair tall for the case. I was able to get it closed. Wished i had gone with the shorter cooler. As of right now I’m definitely happy i made this move the system actually saturated my 10gig network without a problem even when i have multiple computers on 10gig cards hitting it. Plex actually seams more responsive in house and my friends say it seams a little faster on their end too. My Ubuntu VM is faster and more responsive also. The disk shelf is just as fast as if i was placing the drives directly into the machine. I will be adding a 24 bay 3.5 inch disk self down the line to add even more storage eventually.

My journey started about 3 years ago in 2016. I had a WD PR4100 running Plex and it was super slow to transfer files to and had issues streaming more than 2 movies at a time. I had heard about FreeNAS so I took a really old AMD phantom II and am3+ motherboard and some old hard drives I had laying around and started playing with it. 11.1 was still in beta so I started off with 9 which worked quite well. “Once I had things figured out.” But the read and write speeds were a little slow for my liking but faster than the My Cloud. I had also heard about Unraid so went to try to install that and no matter what I did I couldn’t get it up and running. I also knew I would have to pay for it after I reached a certain amount of drives. So I decided to stick with FreeNAS. In 2017 right before I finished my testing 11.1 stable was released so I did some testing with that and decided to move forward with that build. Next came the decision to either stick with really old hardware or to get a rack server because I already had acquired a 42U rack (wife almost killed me when I came home with it). I came across a HP ProLiant DL360 G7 8-bay server with 2 6 core Xeon’s and 64gigs of ram for a really good price that I just couldn’t pass up. I pulled the trigger on that and decided that for the speeds I wanted to transfer things at I should put 2tb SSD’s in this unit. (Yes I know overkill). I also picked up an Intel x540t2 10gig NIC. I started off with 4 drives in a raidz setup. And I held onto the WD PR4100 for a bit and used it for a back up of the FreeNAS unit. Quickly I realized 4 Micron 1100 ssd’s wouldn’t last the year. I picked up 4 more thought about just adding them to the pool to basically make a raidZ2 but realized I needed the space more so I rebuilt the Pool. Thing made me realize how important it was to plan ahead. In the fall of 2018 after running into issues with the WD My Cloud not reporting a bad drive I decided it was time to build a secondary FreeNAS box that would house only Spinning rust drives that I could do nightly backup’s to. I picked up a Rosewill 4U case that came with 12 hot swap bays. Should have looked around more and gone with a Norco RPC-4220 case it’s about the same price. I had recently upgraded my dad’s tower so I had an AMD fx8350 and ASUS TUF SABERTOOTH 990FX laying around so in went that and now 8 4tb wd red drives. I also picked up a LSI SAS9201-8i card. I ran these 2 servers until the spring of 2019. That spring after looking at the usage data I realized I should just combine these into 1 server. Needed the cores of the xeon’s but I also needed at least 8 2.5” bays for the ssd’s in a hot swap. So I found a 12x2.5 hot swap 3x5.25 cage to put in the Rosewill case. I went with a Supermicro X8DTH-6F dual LGA1366, (2) Xeon x5690, 192 gigs of ddr3 ecc ram, LSI9201-16i, and 4 more ssd’s. This ran great struggled a little when I was editing video and Plex was transcoding 1080p to SD/720 when I had 4 people hitting the server at the same time from outside the house but never really slowed down noticeably. Found a bad cable in one of the SAS to SATA breakout cables went to replace that cable and replace the battery on the board because anytime the power was disconnected it would try to boot from a hard drive and not the flash drives. And the board wouldn’t start up. I spent 3 hours trying to figure it out. All I had was a blinking BMC light. And it wouldn’t start up at all. (We’ll get back to my stupidity in a bit) I decided that maybe it was time to make one finally upgrade because I was adding a LSI9201-16e to the server so I could just add disk shelf’s when I wanted to add more storage. (I’m a bad data hoarder). So being tired and frustrated with the server (up too early for kid’s football games). I drove the hour and ten to microcenter and picked up a 2920X, Gigabyte x399 Aorus pro atx and 128 gigs of GSKILL AEGIS DDR4 3000 ram. Unfortunately they didn’t have an air cooler so I did up having to order one from Amazon will be in Tuesday 10/22. I got home and started taking everything apart moving stand off’s to where they needed to be for the new motherboard and taking picks of all the parts I know was working perfectly to sell to try and recoup some money from the new parts I had bought. I looked at the motherboard carefully thinking maybe it was a capacitor or something that finally went. And I was going to try and just replace that to get it working again to sell. I then noticed the pins for the power switch, restart, and stuff had a label next to them. I remember looking the manual super carefully and the manual had it numbered 1 to 20 bottom to top. I thought that was weird but most motherboards are. Well the label on the board its self showed it numbered 1 to 20 top to bottom. So at 10pm Sunday night not being able to just let things go I plugged the board into a known good power supply put the CPU’s back in and put the coolers back on with a stick of ram in each. I then waited for the BMC light to turn on and low and behold after a second or two I was able to short the pins that were labeled power switch and it turned on and went to the bios no problem. After some back and forth I decided to continue forward with the Threadripper figuring that using a processor on a 14nm with a lot more cache with higher clock speeds is worth the upgrade. Things learned: Always look at the motherboard carefully when building it may be different than the manual Never jump the gun to replace something just because you’re tired and frustrated. It could be something stupid Never bring a 5 year old to Microcenter you’ll want to rip your hair out. Lol.

I ended up abandoning it completely. I have decided to go with FreeNAS. I understand Proxmox is probably much better. But after the issues i had with unraid and i was mostly looking to stream Media and use it as a NAS. It also only took me maybe 15 minutes to get it up and running on 2 different machines for testing. I didn't want to spend another week fighting with it just to figure out that my machines don't like it.

Ya i read that and said i cant use that one. So I started looking into proxmox. But i would really like to get Unraid up and running.

Well right now on the HP ProLiant DL360 i just have windows 10 and i don't want to keep that as the OS. VM's wont be used all the time so that is now my main focus. I will look into those though. On the ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX I have turned secure boot Other OS because it doesn't have an option to turn it off. I have it on UEFI because the flash drive shows up as UEFI. The drive is in a USB 2.0 port and is a USB2.0 drive. I have made sure that i removed the spinning rust drives and cd drive from being seen as boot locations. On the Poweredge i did turn it off. That one is an old machine so it doesnt have an option to boot in UEFI but I had no problems putting windows or linux ubuntu on it. and that one only had usb 2.0.

I'm trying to get Unraid onto an older tower with a couple of drives that way i can test out the actual OS before i put it on my HP ProLiant DL360 server for Plex , Sorage, and VMs but no matter what i do i can not get it first i tried on an old Dell Poweredge 1950 with no luck. So i figured id move my drives and flash drive to an ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX with and AMD FX-8350. I have tried everything i can to get this to boot into the drive looked at every thing about settings in the BIOS. I would really like to try out this OS and have an idea about what i will need to do to get it on the server. Any Help with this and i would be super grateful. I have tried FreeNAS 11.2 and 11.1 on both machines and it seams that plex no longer has a download for them.

i see everyone is freaked out by the raid 0 decison. i have a 16 tb NAS in a raid 5 that this server backs up to every night. So lets not worry about loosing data. i can redownload everything any time.

I happened to come across an older HP ProLiant DL360 G7 8-Port that i picked up. Currently i am running Win 10 pro on it but i had to use 1 of the drive bays to put the os on. I have 2 3.46 GHz Hex-Core Intel Xeon Processor and 64 gigs of ram in it. It has a 1 x Smart Array P410i 512MB raid card in it. I have searched everywhere and have found nothing on putting Unraid or FreeNAS on this machine. I currently have 4 2 tb drives and will be expanding to 4 more. so i want to get the drive that has the OS out of the hop swap slot. I plan on running at least 1 if not 2 windows 10 vm's. 1 for my camera server and 1 for my plex machine if plex doesn't run nicely by its self on these systems. This system is just for speed of media i have a 16 tb WD NAS i use for long term storage / backups So I'm looking at both but not sure what to go with. Questions i have. Setting up the drives do i need to set up the drives individually with the raid set up? or to i just set them up as 1 big drive "Raid 0"? it has a usb2 slot internal should i use that or the internal sd card slot? Any help with this would be awesome.

I purchased 2 ASUS XG-C100C 10G NIC’s and they work decently well. My one worry with them is it looks like the stand-off’s are a little tall because the thermal tape does not seam to be in full contact with the chip or heat sink. Has anyone replaced the stand-off’s on these yet? Or could someone point me to a place where i could get shorter stand-off’s once i measure the existing ones.

see above

So i just got a set of these used that have quite a few scratches on the heat sink. I was thinking i should lap the heat sink but it has 2 holes in the top of the heat sink. I know they don't produce much heat but still would rather a flat surface. Can i fill those holes with 2 part epoxy so i can lap them?