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Please help superboyac build a server (2013 edition).
superboyac:
Regarding the cables that connect the m1015 SAS ports to the actual hard drives, I came across this helpful post:
Hi electricd7,
I'm actually going to be bolting pretty much that exact motherboard-processor-memory combination into my existing filer tonight!
What you need are SFF-8087 cables. They come in 2 different "flavors":
Forward Breakout = crossover = SFF-8087 (Controller card) to 4x SAS/SATA ports on DRIVES
Reverse Breakout = 1:1 = SATA/SAS Ports (on Motherboard or controller) to SFF-8087 backplane
You will need "forward" cables available here:
http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10254&cs_id=1025406
I use a Fractal Designs R3 case and bought the .75M ones which turned out to be just about the perfect length to go from the card, down to the case bottom & back up to the 8 drive sleds.
While you are ordering the 8087 cables you might as well get some Molex-to-SATA converters as well:
http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10226&cs_id=1022604
Use these so you only need to get 2 Molex power connectors to the drives instead of 6 proper SATA power connectors, makes for a real clean install.
-Will
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superboyac:
(I've updated the first post with the HBA card and SAS cables.)
superboyac:
A guide for newbies to FreeNAS, updated with v9.1 info. Nice!
Some of my personal highlights:
Please recognize that your Windows hardware knowledge may provide some small insight for selecting hardware but is not equivalent to expertly choosing hardware for a FreeBSD based system. For example, ECC RAM in a desktop isn’t too useful. But for ZFS it can be the difference between saving your data and a complete loss of the zpool with no chance for recovery. Realtek NICs are common in the Windows world, but perform extremely poorly in FreeBSD.
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FreeBSD has a very steep learning curve. It is not for those looking to learn it in a weekend. I was operating a nuclear reactor before I was old enough to drink alcohol, but I still spent a solid month getting familiar with FreeNAS. Everyone’s mileage will vary and your level of “comfort” with FreeNAS will be different than mine. But I haven’t lost any data and I have helped many people recover an unmountable zpool.
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VDevs with single disks are known as “striped” disks. They have no redundancy.
VDevs can provide redundancy from individual hard disk failure inside the same VDev.
VDevs cannot operate outside of a zpool.
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You cannot add more hard drives to a VDev once it is created.*
When a VDev can no longer provide 100% of its data using checksums or mirrors, the VDev will fail.
If any VDev in a zpool is failed, you will lose the entire zpool with no chance of partial recovery.
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You can think of it simply as:
Hard drive(s) goes inside VDevs.
Vdevs go inside zpools.
Zpools store your data.
Disk failure isn’t the concern with ZFS. Vdev failure is! Keep the VDevs healthy and your data is safe.
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ZIL drive performance will need to exceed the zpool performance of the expected workload to be useful. Typically an SSD is used for this application. An Enterprise class SSD or SSD based on SLC memory is recommended.
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For maximum performance and reliability, you should never try to use ZFS with less than 8GB of RAM and a 64-bit system.
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Intel Network cards are the NIC of choice. The drivers are well maintained and provide excellent performance(not to mention inexpensive). Other NICs have been known to perform intermittently, poorly, or not at all. Realtek NICs can perform decently as long as you have a CPU that has enough power to process all of the network traffic. (This is one thing that is VERY different between Windows and FreeBSD). Using “low power” CPUs such as Intel Atoms and AMD C-70s are NOT powerful enough to be used with Realtek and get good performance.
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ZFS has very few “recovery tools” unlike many other file systems. For this reason, backups are very important. If the zpool becomes unmountable and cannot be repaired there are no easy software tools or reasonably priced recovery specialists you can use to recover your data. This is because ZFS is enterprise-class software, and no enterprise would waste their time with recovery tools or data recovery specialists. They would simply recover from a known good backup or mirror server.
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OK...this is the freaking tutorial I've been dying for! :up: :up: Great stuff. I'm only about 75% of the way through, but I'm tired now.
superboyac:
Call me crazy, but just for backup, I'm considering getting a standard plug-and-play NAS box. Maybe from Qnap...a 4 or 5 bay one. If it becomes redundant later after i have my custom boxes working, i can put them in a relative's home for off-sute backup purposes, etc.
superboyac:
OK, yes. I believe I am first going to do a small 4-drive test build. I'm going to build a small-case NAS for 4 drives and that will be my first experiment.
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