great vid, I've been in the process of upgrading from a openmediavault setup and looking into truenas for my next upgrade. Nice to see what kind of performance you get from just regular spinning drives.
Really interesting, nice one. I'm testing using a very old Athlon dual cpu, 8gb of ram and 4 320gb hdd. Z2 and 100mb speeds no problem - held back by 1gb card I guess. Pulled a drive and put another in, no probs. Thanks for introducing me to FreeNAS, I have a lot of learning but impressed so far 👍
This is the same configuration as my backup FreeNAS system! Using 32GB memory, though. The 4770K is a great CPU to repurpose, haven’t seen any bottlenecks. This system was my primary desktop before upgrading to Ryzen 3900X. ZFS is amazing
For my truenas system I used a ROG motherboard as well. it is of an older vintage, Maximums II formula. The max ram is can support is 8 gigs, and I am running that.
In fact (though I think you know), you can set up 1 pool with 2 vdev with different resilvering protocol and different size via command line “-f”. I did that with 1T*2+500G*1 using partition, 1 mirror(500G*2) + 1 RAIDZ(500G*3)= total 1.5T of usable space, which can suffer 1disk parity.
People need to ask themselves if they really need to have it all in a single pool. I run multiple pools where I have different sets of drives. Each pool has sufficient disk space. If it is just for backup or media then running multiple pools is no problem. Set up alerting when a pool gets near full so you can step in and redirect things to another pool. I know having a massive pool with many vdevs is convenient and cool but it has many downsides also. I cannot afford to buy enough drives to have high performance pools anyways so I just keep a couple big SSDs in my server for things that need speed.
What is the command to show up first how many ada (what is ada... reminds me of the old PATA drives ...shouldnt be there sda instead) drives you have in order then to check the specs of them? In your second example where you set up raid z2 which option did you enable in order for ram t obe used instead ... is that natively enabled when you choose raidz2? Because I didnt notice doing anything to enable it? Thank you
Great tutorial. However I was wondering how you could add these separate RaidZ of 4x1TB and RaidZ of 4 x500GB to Pool in a Ubuntu system using the CLI as there is no GUI like FreeNas has. Cheers & many thanks.
So now I must devote several seconds to crushing the 'must have lots of RAM' paradigms I have mentally committed to??! :) (Great demo, Sir, and a fantastic demo of FreeNAS capabilities!)
Thank you for this. one thing that i becoming more common with people like me running Freenas at home for a while.. running out of space... what is the solution. ? i know there is more then one way to Rome but was curious on how you would approach this from a home guy.. add vdev vs add new pool
Would love to see, that they bring in the Feature to expand single Vdevs, or/and make Vdevs with Missmatched drivesizes like in BTRFS. For Homestorage it would be the nonplus ultra.
great stuff....might have a go at rebuilding my freenas now with some mixed drives....is raid z2 better than z for data protection on my work docs server which i use everyday for work....is it likely i need two drive redundancy or not?....server is only doing light work....thanks
It would be interesting to know how much performance loss is down to encryption and whether using self-encrypting features is better since it offloads that job to the drives themselves
Lawrence Systems / PC Pickup I’m looking for the same situation here. As a backup for a backup. My reddit post they told me to check this video out, so thank you for the great video. As a newbie, in my head I kind of think it would be stable enough to not have 2VDEVs go down at the same time. Trying to avoid paying out for unRAID and put parts to use. www.reddit.com/r/freenas/comments/gb8xqb/can_freenas_add_mixed_size_drives_for_a_single/?
If you have a setup with mirrors, put it in one zpool. If you have another set of disks with raidz1, put it in another zpool by itself. DO NOT attempt to mix vdev types in the same pool - this is not a SAN or "flexible RAID" and there are obvious Best Practices.
Stupid question: Even through the transfer speed is only around 300 MB/s, why is so much RAM being used? And what would the transfer speeds look like if the system only had 4GB of RAM?
if you have critical data, one uses a proper set of server hardware...; with user-grade stuff, you risk a 1 in 10,000 chance of some corruption, but, really no more so than with any system losing data as a result of using non-ECC....
@@mdd1963 I thought about playing around with FreeNAS at home...so nothing mission critical... I have a Supermicro mini tower server with 4 3.5" bays I was thinking about running a NAS VM then using those bays as the drives.
Non ecc work fine I reused my old i7-920 system and replaced it with xeon 6 core and 3x4gb ECC sticks and a 8 port (it mode) raid card spent like £80 for everything (well each 8tb disks cost more then the system it self)
artlessknave if it’s a backup of a backup why not? Isn’t it good to have an extra backup and not leave unused parts going to waste? Or is this a situation to buy an unRAID license?
The motherboard does NOT ‘see’ partition changes like that. It simply sees HD PRESENCE, example the boot drive is drive 0 but there is no drive 0 now, so go to the next drive in the boot list. Now, the UEFI bios, do look for an UEFI boot signature on the drives, so if the boot drive is gone, or if another drive is made bootable (UEFI signature/code), some motherboards would try to boot from that drive afterwards. I wonder where that silly myth came from about mixing drives, memory etc. for FreeNAS. Probably somebody without understanding of programming or io coding.
So... so long as every disk is a vdev, I can add *actual* mismatched drives in a pool? I mean, most home users are never going to have 5 of one size drive and 5 of another. They'll be more like me: 1x 2tb, 1x 3tb, 2x 4tb and wanting to add a 6 or 8tb
this is my biggest dislike of freenas.. to expensive to upgrade depending onhow your drives are configured and a bunch of 2 drive pools is wasteful. I currently have 1 six disk zpool
So glad that you run Linux Lawrence! So refreshing to view a competent IT administrator on TH-cam.
Thank you
ZFS ftw!
great vid, I've been in the process of upgrading from a openmediavault setup and looking into truenas for my next upgrade. Nice to see what kind of performance you get from just regular spinning drives.
Really interesting, nice one. I'm testing using a very old Athlon dual cpu, 8gb of ram and 4 320gb hdd. Z2 and 100mb speeds no problem - held back by 1gb card I guess. Pulled a drive and put another in, no probs.
Thanks for introducing me to FreeNAS, I have a lot of learning but impressed so far 👍
This is the same configuration as my backup FreeNAS system! Using 32GB memory, though. The 4770K is a great CPU to repurpose, haven’t seen any bottlenecks. This system was my primary desktop before upgrading to Ryzen 3900X. ZFS is amazing
For my truenas system I used a ROG motherboard as well. it is of an older vintage, Maximums II formula. The max ram is can support is 8 gigs, and I am running that.
In fact (though I think you know), you can set up 1 pool with 2 vdev with different resilvering protocol and different size via command line “-f”. I did that with 1T*2+500G*1 using partition, 1 mirror(500G*2) + 1 RAIDZ(500G*3)= total 1.5T of usable space, which can suffer 1disk parity.
And nice video btw, I’ve learned a lot from you!!!! Thank u very much!!
People need to ask themselves if they really need to have it all in a single pool. I run multiple pools where I have different sets of drives. Each pool has sufficient disk space. If it is just for backup or media then running multiple pools is no problem. Set up alerting when a pool gets near full so you can step in and redirect things to another pool. I know having a massive pool with many vdevs is convenient and cool but it has many downsides also. I cannot afford to buy enough drives to have high performance pools anyways so I just keep a couple big SSDs in my server for things that need speed.
What is the command to show up first how many ada (what is ada... reminds me of the old PATA drives ...shouldnt be there sda instead) drives you have in order then to check the specs of them?
In your second example where you set up raid z2 which option did you enable in order for ram t obe used instead ... is that natively enabled when you choose raidz2? Because I didnt notice doing anything to enable it?
Thank you
So can I add a single drive in a vdev to increase the size of a data pool?
Great tutorial. However I was wondering how you could add these separate RaidZ of 4x1TB and RaidZ of 4 x500GB to Pool in a Ubuntu system using the CLI as there is no GUI like FreeNas has. Cheers & many thanks.
So now I must devote several seconds to crushing the 'must have lots of RAM' paradigms I have mentally committed to??! :) (Great demo, Sir, and a fantastic demo of FreeNAS capabilities!)
Yeah, the 1GB RAM per 1TB of storage myth runs strong.
More ram is always more better. However you can also just add more later. RAM upgrades are the easiest!
LOL dude - FrankenNAS? FreeNAStyassNAS? Always good fun Tom! :)
Thank you for this. one thing that i becoming more common with people like me running Freenas at home for a while.. running out of space... what is the solution. ? i know there is more then one way to Rome but was curious on how you would approach this from a home guy.. add vdev vs add new pool
Cool, I’ll have to watch this later but it’s very much right up my alley. Thanks for the informative video
Do other sharing technologies (under the window) have better performance than SMB?
Who else loves ZFS?
I do!
I don't think the word "love" can express how much I like ZFS
Would love to see, that they bring in the Feature to expand single Vdevs, or/and make Vdevs with Missmatched drivesizes like in BTRFS. For Homestorage it would be the nonplus ultra.
Me
Have since freebsd 4? I think it was... Anyway.
great stuff....might have a go at rebuilding my freenas now with some mixed drives....is raid z2 better than z for data protection on my work docs server which i use everyday for work....is it likely i need two drive redundancy or not?....server is only doing light work....thanks
It would be interesting to know how much performance loss is down to encryption and whether using self-encrypting features is better since it offloads that job to the drives themselves
Don't use self encrypting. Use geli instead, the performance impact is tiny at best
11:47 "if the little SanDisk USB [...] were to ever fail" 😏😏 naaaaah, not any chance of that happenin', right ? LOL
Can I combine pool/vdevs from different FreeNAS machines into one large pool?
Move your dataset from the source to destination via zfs send and receive
is there any way to run freenas and pfsense on the same linux box. or is it not a good idea
Not a good idea
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS ok, ty. so 2 separate systems. no problem
Doesn't FreeNAS use free memory for ARC writes not ZFS cache?
Interesting that the stats shows that the smaller drives seemed to be getting about the same amount of data written as the larger drives.
great video tom , question is freenas running bare metal or on xcp-ng? was a bit confused with the freenas installation trough xen orchestra.. thanks!
he demo'd an install with XCP-NG, the system he was actually using was bare metal....(i think)
Bare metal. I used XCP-ng just to show what the installer looks like
Each VDEV has to match in regards to its RAID type, is that gospel? Can I get away with 2 vdevs using mirror and one using raid 5 /Z1?
Not sure I would try it unless you want the ZFS gods to smite your data.
Lawrence Systems / PC Pickup I’m looking for the same situation here. As a backup for a backup. My reddit post they told me to check this video out, so thank you for the great video. As a newbie, in my head I kind of think it would be stable enough to not have 2VDEVs go down at the same time. Trying to avoid paying out for unRAID and put parts to use. www.reddit.com/r/freenas/comments/gb8xqb/can_freenas_add_mixed_size_drives_for_a_single/?
If you have a setup with mirrors, put it in one zpool. If you have another set of disks with raidz1, put it in another zpool by itself. DO NOT attempt to mix vdev types in the same pool - this is not a SAN or "flexible RAID" and there are obvious Best Practices.
nice video like always but check out your audio is almost only on the left channel, is really disturbing lessening on headphone
Stupid question: Even through the transfer speed is only around 300 MB/s, why is so much RAM being used? And what would the transfer speeds look like if the system only had 4GB of RAM?
Hi Tom , which hdd controller card are you using , best regards Lance
Just the built in / on board controller.
cool thanks a bunch and keep smiling :-)
If I had your spare parts I'd throw mine away 😂 am running a Dell optiplex 780 why because it was free...
on a Core 2 Duo? Man that sucks
Felix He says, “check my TH-cam name for a reply” 😂
What window manager are you using?
POP_OS!
Is Windows 11 pro doing a similar move
Thanks and Awesome video.
They do include quite a few for a gaming motherboard!
What about non-ECC???
Well he built it on an Intel 4770K which doesn't support ECC.
if you have critical data, one uses a proper set of server hardware...; with user-grade stuff, you risk a 1 in 10,000 chance of some corruption, but, really no more so than with any system losing data as a result of using non-ECC....
Non ECC is fine.
@@mdd1963 I thought about playing around with FreeNAS at home...so nothing mission critical... I have a Supermicro mini tower server with 4 3.5" bays I was thinking about running a NAS VM then using those bays as the drives.
Non ecc work fine
I reused my old i7-920 system and replaced it with xeon 6 core and 3x4gb ECC sticks and a 8 port (it mode) raid card spent like £80 for everything (well each 8tb disks cost more then the system it self)
many are they who ask the question of if it *can* be done and ignore whether it *should* be done.
artlessknave if it’s a backup of a backup why not? Isn’t it good to have an extra backup and not leave unused parts going to waste? Or is this a situation to buy an unRAID license?
I've used SSDs slower than that. 300 MB/s is pretty respectable.
Using web browser to copy files is misleading in terms od performance. Mount shares via nfs and use rsync with parallel threads.
I use ZFS on unraid
The motherboard does NOT ‘see’ partition changes like that.
It simply sees HD PRESENCE, example the boot drive is drive 0 but there is no drive 0 now, so go to the next drive in the boot list.
Now, the UEFI bios, do look for an UEFI boot signature on the drives, so if the boot drive is gone, or if another drive is made bootable (UEFI signature/code), some motherboards would try to boot from that drive afterwards.
I wonder where that silly myth came from about mixing drives, memory etc. for FreeNAS.
Probably somebody without understanding of programming or io coding.
So... so long as every disk is a vdev, I can add *actual* mismatched drives in a pool? I mean, most home users are never going to have 5 of one size drive and 5 of another. They'll be more like me: 1x 2tb, 1x 3tb, 2x 4tb and wanting to add a 6 or 8tb
That design would lack any fault tolerance
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS True, but that's what external backups are for (at least for my situation). So, still do-able?
If any one was setting this up they wouldn't likely be using different size disks
acronym meltdown---"What's a VDEV?"
this is my biggest dislike of freenas.. to expensive to upgrade depending onhow your drives are configured and a bunch of 2 drive pools is wasteful. I currently have 1 six disk zpool
first