Refurbished Servers for FreeNAS

[Nitricspace]

Hey there,

 

I'm new to using FreeNAS so bear with me if I'm making common mistakes that I haven't found in my research so far. I'm looking to set up a small home NAS setup using 4TB WD reds because of their value over 2 or 3TB variants. I'm planing to start with using 3 drives in RaidZ1, I'm aware that using this configuration is frowned upon as there is only one parity disk but the setup is just for home use and I want as much capacity for the money as possible, although it would suck to lose photos or documents stored on the machine. When I have the requirements and the budget I'll add another 3 drives to expand the pool.

 

I'm currently looking at two different options from Bargain Hardware on Ebay, an R710 with a L5630 or an EMC Avamar with dual E5-2609s, the first of which I've been told is fairly good value. I'd love some input on these options or recommendations if possible. I'm aware the specific raid cards may not be able to be used as a standard SATA controller to allow software RAID through ZFS, so I'm planning to buy an M1015 to install instead.

 

Any help or feedback on these choices would be greatly appreciated!

[Olaf6541]

Yeah £80 including shipping for a full system seems like a good deal indeed. Ive no idea what raid card that r710 has but putting in a m1015 should work fine with freenas.

Also keep in mind that you cannot simply expand your pool, youll have to delete the raidz1 pool and make a new one including the new drives (or make a second separate pool). So dont fill up your raidz1 without any backup (having a backup is a good idea anyway).

[paddy-stone]

OK, firstly let me say that even if you do use parity, it doesn't take the place of a backup for your data... it's more for convenience than having to copy all your data back over from your backup. I would highly advise making sure you have backups before parity... unless you don't care about the data.

I know it's hard, but it's much better to have the peace of mind that if your server or disks fail, you have a backup somewhere that's only accessed to sync data for example. I've only just recently gotten my main server back online, and this time added a parity disk for convenience. I still have my backup server, USB backup and an off-site backup, just in case... I only have the off-site, and one USB backup, backing up vital data only, so smaller drives needed. Then my backup server and one USB backup backs up everything. Sounds a lot, but if my main server fails, more than 1 drive now with parity... then I put my backup server online while I sort it out... my USB backup is for crisis situation, meaning I could grab that quickly if I had to leave the house in an emergency, or if the worst happens and both the servers crap out.

 

 

[Nitricspace]

3 hours ago, Olaf6541 said:

Yeah £80 including shipping for a full system seems like a good deal indeed. Ive no idea what raid card that r710 has but putting in a m1015 should work fine with freenas.

Also keep in mind that you cannot simply expand your pool, youll have to delete the raidz1 pool and make a new one including the new drives (or make a second separate pool). So dont fill up your raidz1 without any backup (having a backup is a good idea anyway).

I understand, I didn't mean I was going to expand the RaidZ1 array but rather add an entirely new RaidZ1 array with identical drives. This would allow me to expand the storage available on my freenas server without having to transfer or backup my data right? 

[Olaf6541]

2 minutes ago, Nitricspace said:

I understand, I didn't mean I was going to expand the RaidZ1 array but rather add an entirely new RaidZ1 array with identical drives. This would allow me to expand the storage available on my freenas server without having to transfer or backup my data right? 

Exactly, you just add a new pool of storage available for you to fill. However, you should always have a backup anyway as stated by @paddy-stone before. Should your psu go out with a bang or your house catch on fire somehow, then even the safest raid config wont protect you. So i would advice to think about backup the size of your server storage. Example: I have 3 240gb ssd's in raidz1, and when im at my parents house I remote connect and sync a 1tb hdd via windows (its a smb share). Its simple, but it works.

[Nitricspace]

@Olaf6541 see, I was wondering if it was worth the extra cost for parity disks considering I'm using NAS certified drives. @paddy-stone Do you think it would be worth it spending the money that would have been spent on parity on a set of backup drives or a seperate server and running the main server with no parity? Ideally I'd like to have both but I do see that it could be more likely for something to cause all of the drives to be lost like a house fire or PSU issue than a single drive to fail and wipe the data. 

 

Regarding the servers, any thoughts on the actual hardware? If the cheaper one is as good value as it seems I could spend some of the difference on a more recent processor. Although if there are any alternative suggestions for hardware that would be great. 

 

I'm guessing freenas has features that automate backups over the local network as well as to offsite servers? 

[Olaf6541]

2 hours ago, Nitricspace said:

Regarding the servers, any thoughts on the actual hardware? If the cheaper one is as good value as it seems I could spend some of the difference on a more recent processor. Although if there are any alternative suggestions for hardware that would be great. 

I would go for the cheaper r710, and stick with the L5630. Its more than enough for freenas (i currently use a j3355).

You could make a vm for remote access using a vpn server and still have cpu cores left for experimenting with other vm's.

If you do plan on using more vm's I would advice to go with 16GB of ram instead of 8GB.

 

2 hours ago, Nitricspace said:

I'm guessing freenas has features that automate backups over the local network as well as to offsite servers? 

Yes it does (rsync) but since I went with the manual external hdd backup solution I never really looked into this.

 

2 hours ago, Nitricspace said:

I was wondering if it was worth the extra cost for parity disks considering I'm using NAS certified drives.

Even NAS drives can fail for whatever reason. Ideally you want both raid for safety and backup for all cases where raid doesnt protect you.

But its a cost/reliability trade-off that only you can decide. It depends on what value the data on the NAS has to you.

[paddy-stone]

15 hours ago, Nitricspace said:

@Olaf6541 see, I was wondering if it was worth the extra cost for parity disks considering I'm using NAS certified drives. @paddy-stone Do you think it would be worth it spending the money that would have been spent on parity on a set of backup drives or a seperate server and running the main server with no parity? Ideally I'd like to have both but I do see that it could be more likely for something to cause all of the drives to be lost like a house fire or PSU issue than a single drive to fail and wipe the data. 

 

Regarding the servers, any thoughts on the actual hardware? If the cheaper one is as good value as it seems I could spend some of the difference on a more recent processor. Although if there are any alternative suggestions for hardware that would be great. 

 

I'm guessing freenas has features that automate backups over the local network as well as to offsite servers? 

Well as mentioned by @Olaf6541, it's subjective to your personal values you set on the data whether it's worth it or not. But IMO it is, and TBH you don't need to spend tons on a backup server and extra disks.. you could get away with a just big enough USB external drive to copy your most prized possessions onto, and just back it up every week or when major changes occur etc. Aslong as you actually have a backup that can be copied from if the worst happens and you have a drive/multiple drive failures depending on if you're using parity disks too.

 

I would go with having one parity drive (2 if you can afford it), and in your situation go with a 4/6/8TB USB external... in my setup I have the external attached to my main pc, but you could IIRC have it set up on the freenas machine as an extra pool if you wanted... I didn't look into this really in my case as it's easier to have it on my desktop.

 

Another thing to bear in mind is (at the moment at least) that freenas can't expand a raid array... so in the future if you need more space, you'll need to have that data backed up somewhere else to be able to re-configure your raid array with more disks added. So having a backup in that situation is essential to getting things done.

[Nitricspace]

Thanks @paddy-stone and @Olaf6541, really appreciate the input. My R710 arrived today and I am going to outfit it with 3 4TB Ironwolf drives in RAIDZ1 with an external HDD for essential file backups. I'm now looking at exactly what RAID card I should get that can be run in JBOD mode so I can let ZFS handle RAID. I'm thinking of buying a PERC H700 kit with battery and replacement cables instead of the 1015 because I've seen people have success using it in this exact server.

 

However, I'm a bit confused at why all the different eBay listings for a H700 kit are all vastly different prices. I see some have 512MB of cache and some have 1GB, but I've seen refurbished cards listed anywhere from £20 to £160. Are all H700 RAID cards not the same? Do I need to be really careful with buying the correct card for my R710 or should any H700 work? Considering my final plan is to have two RAIDz1 arrays each with 3 4TB drives, will the H700 work for this usecase?

 

I'm planning on buying this simply because it's one of the cheapest listings, although I'm not sure if it will work since other identical-looking H700s seem to go for a lot more.

 

Thanks so much for the help so far

Edited September 19, 2019 by Nitricspace

[Olaf6541]

11 hours ago, Nitricspace said:

I'm now looking at exactly what RAID card I should get that can be run in JBOD mode so I can let ZFS handle RAID. I'm thinking of buying a PERC H700 kit with battery and replacement cables instead of the 1015 because I've seen people have success using it in this exact server.

I dont have any experience with RAID cards but if you want to go the cheap way (and not having to deal with flashing to IT mode) I bought a bunch of these:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/PCI-E-To-SATA3-PCI-E-SATA3-0-6Gb-s-SSD-Asmedia-Chip-Expansion-Card-ASM1061-EXP/272283351945

I know they are not generally recommended (driver issues in the past) but they work just fine, and are really cheap. Though I dont know how much pcie slots you have.

[Nitricspace]

Looks like I made a mistake with the PERC H700, I understood it could be flashed or crossflashed to act in JBOD mode but I was wrong. I now have a PERC 6i that I can't use and a H700 that I can only use in hardware RAID (which I want to avoid as I'm using FreeNAS).

 

Currently, my solution is to run each drive in a hardware RAID 0 and then pass those RAIDs to FreeNAS to run them RAIDz1. I understand this is definitely not a recommended usecase, but just how much risk is there of data loss? If it's a serious reliability issue then I'll look into selling both cards and buying a SAS HBA card instead.

 

Please let me know what you think of the solution, and how much risk is involved.

[Kered124]

On 10/2/2019 at 1:22 PM, Nitricspace said:

If it's a serious reliability issue then I'll look into selling both cards and buying a SAS HBA card instead.

Yes. Your OS can't properly communicate with the drives at a low level to read out SMART data and won't be able to predict issues/failures. I'd recommend selling the two and buying an HBA that is already in IT mode so you don't have to mess with flashing it.

[bowrilla]

Do not use hardware RAID controllers with ZFS. This does not make any sense at all. ZFS needs direct access to the drives and does not use regular RAID but RAID-Z. You'll be messing up your NAS and data. This undermindes the whole data integrity advantage of ZFS. It is possible (with knowledge) but very much not advised.

[bigchew151]

Here Is a Link to a lsi SAS card that you can use with FreeNas This is the one i use(I think.lol.) ! I flashed mine to It Mode But This one has alredy ben done & its only 35$ ! I Am Not A Expert on freenas by any means but i have ben using it for a cuple of years with 10Gb networking & i love it 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Genuine-LSI-6Gbps-SAS-HBA-LSI-9200-8i-9211-8I-IT-Mode-ZFS-FreeNAS-unRAID-US/123916887273?hash=item1cda05a4e9:g:k0IAAOSw6k9did97