My data has outgrown my faithful NeadyNAS DUO, i am looking to use a spare PC as my NAS, its current specs are Q9550 2.83GHz, 8GB ddr2-4200, Gigabyte EP45-UD3R, the drives i have 4x 1TB Seagate Barracuda's ST310005N1A1AS-RK ( 32 MB cache 7200 RPM ). its all setup with W7 right now, RAID 5... it took allmost 3 days to finish initialization. i had a question how long would it take to rebuild this array should one of the drive's fail? i know during this time should another drive fail i would lose all the data. this NAS's will be my media server and storage for music,movies, pictures and other mis data.
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NAS storage
- Thread starter JJG
- Start date
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2002
- Location
- Seattle, WA
When I used RAID 5 previously on an ICH9R chipset, a rebuild of my 320GB drives could take as long as 12 hours. I'd expect your rebuild times to be somewhere in that ballpark; 24 hours is probably an upper limit. 
Last edited:
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2002
- Location
- Seattle, WA
It's got to go through every stripe on the drive, read it, construct a parity block, and write the parity block. That takes a while for a terabyte of data. Depending on the controller implementation it could go faster or slower. Now that I think about it, 12 hours is a more accurate estimate.
- Thread Starter
- #5
the Controller on that bord is an ICH10R so it should be similar to your ICH9R, another question should i be concered wiht the "write hole" and switch to a ZFS based OS ? i have never done anything in LINUX so it might be difficulte for me to install/run FreeNAS or another LINUX based NAS setup
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2002
- Location
- Seattle, WA
I wouldn't be too concerned with it - it doesn't normally occur. If you're *very* concerned about data integrity then it seems like ZFS will do a better job of preventing that and bit rot, but malfunctions like that should be very rare.
ZFS is a very different architecture. It seems a bit less brittle than RAID 5, but solutions like FreeNAS also require a lot more hardware resources. With your quad core and 8GB of RAM you shouldn't have trouble, but I would read up on it a bit to be sure it's what you want. It also depends on how comfortable you are with Linux.
ZFS is a very different architecture. It seems a bit less brittle than RAID 5, but solutions like FreeNAS also require a lot more hardware resources. With your quad core and 8GB of RAM you shouldn't have trouble, but I would read up on it a bit to be sure it's what you want. It also depends on how comfortable you are with Linux.
- Joined
- May 15, 2006
If you have write back cache disabled, there is no write hole as the data is written as soon as the operating system requests it. The downside is you lose a substantial amount of write speed to the array.
If the data is static, you could enable the write back cache and probably not have any issues. It all comes down to how much you want to spend and what your priority list is.
If the data is static, you could enable the write back cache and probably not have any issues. It all comes down to how much you want to spend and what your priority list is.
- Thread Starter
- #8
isnt FreeNAS suppose to be easy to setup/use ? but this machine is also going to host other apps, maby a small mincraft server, maby a ventrilo server. another requirment is that i would like to be able to securely access my data across the net. I am in the USAF so if i deploy i would like to be able to access my music and maby the movies.
- Joined
- May 1, 2004
- Location
- Iowa City, IA
reposting what i wrote in my PM:
if you really need that level of customizability, you could just install freebsd. then you have zfs raid-z1 and a complete unix-like OS that you can use to install whatever you want on (rtorrent, SABnzbd, whatever). it's a little extra work, but it doesn't require a virtual machine and is still free.
you mention a minecraft server. installation on freebsd is pretty straightforward. same thing for ventrilo.
note, however, that raid-z1 is pretty resource intensive. you've got fairly beefy specs for a server, but raid-z1 will eat up all that ram. moreover, minecraft servers are also pretty resource heavy. i'm not sure it's possible to run both raid-z1 and a minecraft server on the same machine without having like 8 cores and 24gb of ram (that's an exaggeration, but you get my point).
if you really need that level of customizability, you could just install freebsd. then you have zfs raid-z1 and a complete unix-like OS that you can use to install whatever you want on (rtorrent, SABnzbd, whatever). it's a little extra work, but it doesn't require a virtual machine and is still free.
you mention a minecraft server. installation on freebsd is pretty straightforward. same thing for ventrilo.
note, however, that raid-z1 is pretty resource intensive. you've got fairly beefy specs for a server, but raid-z1 will eat up all that ram. moreover, minecraft servers are also pretty resource heavy. i'm not sure it's possible to run both raid-z1 and a minecraft server on the same machine without having like 8 cores and 24gb of ram (that's an exaggeration, but you get my point).
- Thread Starter
- #11
ok, i didnt kow that Raid-Z1 took that much in resource's. but still running two machines all the time would be good on the power bill over here in Germany. but the 2nd pc is an old HP or dell or somthing, so it prob dosent use that much power while idle.
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2002
That may be, but for guys like me that don't know much about any sort of non-windows OS, it works just fine. I have a 14TB array right now and I can expand that up to 57TB just by adding more drives. It still only uses 1 drive for parity, but if two drives fail, only the data on the failed drives is lost, not the whole array. I tried playing with freeNAS a few years ago and was never really happy with it, and I didn't care for WHS 2011, so unRaid worked the best for me.
That the best thing about unraid is that you keep the majority of data on each separate drive. the worst thing, is that performance is crap.
- Thread Starter
- #20
got a question about FreeNas, i am trying to upgrade my ver to FreeNAS-8.0.4-RELEASE-p2-x64.GUI_Upgrade.xz, but when i put all the info in and hit apply it says please wait.. but down in the console messages in the footer its not doing anything. I am following the driection from This sight
