Hello,
I recently built my first FreeNAS server. The goal was to replace my aging Synology DS209 which was too slow (40 MByte/s max over CIFS), loud and running out of space (2x4TB in a mirror setup). First I had planned to buy a DS1415(+) which would be more expensive and not as powerfull as a custom FreeNAS build. (not to mention ZFS and its features). My usecase is mostly storing media for streaming (to FireTV and Android Tablets), some personal documents and photos, a small git repo for some fun projects and running SickRage. (yeah that really worked (somewhat) with the 256 MB Ram of the DS209).
My build (in some points divergent from the usual recommendations, but I hope not in a really bad way):
Mainboard: Fujitsu D3417-B (a Skylake board with C236 chipset and ECC support built for 24/7 usage. It had a good price and supposedly a low power consumption. 6xSATA+M.2 support which I liked)
CPU: Pentium G4400
RAM: 16GB DDR4-2133MHZ ECC CL15 DIMM 2RX8 (one module so that I can upgrade later if needed)
Disks: 5 x WD Red 4TB in RaidZ2
SSD: Samsung SM951-NVM-e 128GB M.2 (for jails and system dataset to let the disks spin down)
PSU: PicoPSU 150W (seems to be low but works great so far. Max power when spinning up the drives is about 120W total, idles at 24 Watt with drives stopped)
UPS: Eaton 3S 550 (not pure sine, but not too expensive and seems to work fine with FreeNAS)
Case: Nanoxia Deep Silence 3 (already knew the case, has good noise insulation, I only use three 120mm fans on slowest speed (2 on the HDDs in, one near the CPU out). CPU is cooled "passive".
My experience, the good:
1. I get the following messages every 10 seconds.:
I believe it is some problem with my mainboard/BIOS or something? Everything seems to work fine. Can I ignore it or should i expect problem because of it? Google didn't really help.
2. It is currently using 159 MB of Swap memory. I am afraid that that may wake up my disks. Is there a way to disable swap on my hdds and only have it on my SSD? I mean with 16 GB Ram there shouldn't be a reason to use it in the first place?
Thanks for FreeNAS and your help :)
I recently built my first FreeNAS server. The goal was to replace my aging Synology DS209 which was too slow (40 MByte/s max over CIFS), loud and running out of space (2x4TB in a mirror setup). First I had planned to buy a DS1415(+) which would be more expensive and not as powerfull as a custom FreeNAS build. (not to mention ZFS and its features). My usecase is mostly storing media for streaming (to FireTV and Android Tablets), some personal documents and photos, a small git repo for some fun projects and running SickRage. (yeah that really worked (somewhat) with the 256 MB Ram of the DS209).
My build (in some points divergent from the usual recommendations, but I hope not in a really bad way):
Mainboard: Fujitsu D3417-B (a Skylake board with C236 chipset and ECC support built for 24/7 usage. It had a good price and supposedly a low power consumption. 6xSATA+M.2 support which I liked)
CPU: Pentium G4400
RAM: 16GB DDR4-2133MHZ ECC CL15 DIMM 2RX8 (one module so that I can upgrade later if needed)
Disks: 5 x WD Red 4TB in RaidZ2
SSD: Samsung SM951-NVM-e 128GB M.2 (for jails and system dataset to let the disks spin down)
PSU: PicoPSU 150W (seems to be low but works great so far. Max power when spinning up the drives is about 120W total, idles at 24 Watt with drives stopped)
UPS: Eaton 3S 550 (not pure sine, but not too expensive and seems to work fine with FreeNAS)
Case: Nanoxia Deep Silence 3 (already knew the case, has good noise insulation, I only use three 120mm fans on slowest speed (2 on the HDDs in, one near the CPU out). CPU is cooled "passive".
My experience, the good:
- Its fast. Easily saturates my gigabit lan (with little CPU load). Sickrage is usable without waiting seconds each click. It seems the is CPU why faster than I expected compared to the on in the DS209. (I expected factor 10 or something, seems way more). So far no regrets not going for a Xeon.
- Its quiet (you can here the discs but way less than with the DS209)
- FreeNAS itself is nice. Installation was easy, jails are great to separate the core NAS system from the other things. I liked that a lot of notifications are pre setup. And documentation (+forum threads) is good.
- ZFS and its features like snapshots are nice to have. While moving the data I executed "rm -r ." by accident in the wrong directory on the old NAS. I will have a quick way to undo things like that in the future.
- Monitoring/Logging in the GUI is really missing. There is no way to monitor the CPU or HDD temperatures, to see the logs, to see the outcome and state of latest scrubs or smart tests, the UPS state or the current usage of the device (like who is connected to which service, which files are accessed). FreeNAS can really improve here. (I added a temp monitoring script from someone in the forums, thanks for that)
- No focus on energy usage. I got disk spindown only really working with the millhouse script from here. And I think higher C-States than C1 should be default at least when powerd is enabled. Energy is not everywhere so cheap than in the USA. And even if, I think it is still important to don't use unnecessary resources if possible.
- Related to that, my energy consumpution is higher than expected. I get 24 Watt when idle and discs are off. I was planning with about 15 Watt. With Linux I get 20, with Windows (didn't try) it should be even less. The reason is most likely that FreeBSD doesn't support all energy saving possibilites. I can live with that. (It's like 20 Euro/year more than expected)
- It would be nice to be able to browse the data in the web gui (like on the Synolgy NASes)
1. I get the following messages every 10 seconds.:
Code:
May 7 21:22:01 freenas ACPI Error: [\_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.H_EC.ECAV] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND (20150515/psargs-391) May 7 21:22:01 freenas ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_TZ_.TZ00._TMP] (Node 0xfffff800075b3900), AE_NOT_FOUND (20150515/psparse-552) May 7 21:22:01 freenas ACPI Error: [\_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.H_EC.ECAV] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND (20150515/psargs-391) May 7 21:22:01 freenas ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_TZ_.TZ01._TMP] (Node 0xfffff800075b37c0), AE_NOT_FOUND (20150515/psparse-552)
I believe it is some problem with my mainboard/BIOS or something? Everything seems to work fine. Can I ignore it or should i expect problem because of it? Google didn't really help.
2. It is currently using 159 MB of Swap memory. I am afraid that that may wake up my disks. Is there a way to disable swap on my hdds and only have it on my SSD? I mean with 16 GB Ram there shouldn't be a reason to use it in the first place?
Thanks for FreeNAS and your help :)