UnRAID on a used server.

[Chris_Hercules]

7 hours ago, Blake said:

The first comment on this reddit thread seems to be a good 'cliff's notes of it'.

did you mean to include a link, Id be more than happy to read over it if you did and would post it for me or tell me the subreddit it is located in.

 

[Mikensan]

11 hours ago, Chris_Hercules said:

So the whole iSCSI thing, if I understand the absolute basics is it lets you set up a drive that will basically appear as a local drive on a machine? Plaus you cab share that to more than one machine and it just appears as a drive to the OS? do I understand it correctly?

Well one of the issues is the way operating systems lock files. Linux if I recall correctly does not lock files so you can share the drive whereas Windows will lock a file.

 

But for the basics yes, when you connect a computer to an iSCSI target, it appears as a local disk. Windows doesn't play nice with network shares, like trying to install an application or indexing etc... so an iSCSI target works great. 

[Chris_Hercules]

5 hours ago, Mikensan said:

Windows doesn't play nice with network shares, like trying to install an application or indexing etc... so an iSCSI target works great. 

Well thats ok. The whole purpose of this machine will be to store our photos and movies and all that normal stuff without having to put really big hard drives in multiple machines. In the long run it will save me money and I personally will have a true crypt folder for anything sensitive.

[Blake]

On 2/12/2016 at 11:19 PM, Chris_Hercules said:

did you mean to include a link, Id be more than happy to read over it if you did and would post it for me or tell me the subreddit it is located in.

 

sorry, https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1h6oia/nfs_vs_iscsi_fight_your_thoughts_on_performance/

[Chris_Hercules]

On 2/11/2016 at 2:07 PM, Mikensan said:

You can install freenas and create vdevs and zpools with what you have just for testing, then when the drives come destroy the zpool.

Well, I have sidesteppied the most obvious issue of the internal NICs not being supported with FreeNAS/BSD and installed a dual gigabit Intel NIC. Have the machine running off of a 16GB usb drive and threw a cpl SSDs I had laying around in t. It works. It is acing a bit strange but Im going to attribute that to the hardware RAID P410 RAID controller and I have an IT mode LSI on the way. The dang HBA is costing more than the initial outlay for the server,but, still pretty cheap in the end and it appears the LSI will handle 2 TB drives where the P410 was stuck at one. Just doubled my capacity. So, in the end we have an LGA 1366 2.13 GHz proc, 24 GB of ECC ram,dual Intel NIC LSI HBA, 6-2TB drives, two 120 GB SSDs as a cache all booting from 16 GB USB flash drive. Should be more than I need for a long time. I may eventually throw in another processor and 24 GB of ram but I doubt I really need it.