23Oct Freenas Build, also I’m back from a month of filming.
Just finished a month of traveling to Boston, Atlanta, Orlando, and Kansas City. I’m glad to be home and ready to take a brake from out of town work for a few weeks. Waiting for me when I got home was everything I ordered for the Freenas build. One change I made to the parts list while I was on the road was an upgrade to 16gb of ram. Newegg had a 24 hour sale and the price was to good to pass up.
The Intel Core i3 and ECS H61H2-M2 Mother board was very easy to install and Freenas had no problem supporting the on board NIC. The only problem I ran into was that the motherboard wouldn’t recognize the USB dvd drive I was trying to use and I ended up having to plug in an old Sata DVD drive to get the install to work. Also I made the mistake of ordering a Micro ATX power supply instead of a ATX12 power supply so I had to make a mounting bracket to get the thing to fit in the case.
I went ahead and installed 2 500gb drives to test out network speeds. File transfers on my laptop through an Ethernet cable are hitting 55MB/s writes and 65MB/s reads which seems to be mostly limited by hard drive speeds. However the NIC on my desktop seems to be locking in at 100Mb which is limiting it to about 10 to 12MB/s file transfers. I wasn’t able to get my desktop motherboard NIC to jump up to 1000Mb speeds so I went ahead and ordered a stand alone PCI-e 1Gb Ethernet card it should show up tomorrow along with 4 3tb Seagate drives. I’ve read a lot of mixed reviews on Seagate’s 3tb drives so I went ahead and spent the extra to get Amazon’s extended 3 year warranty.
With the limited amount of testing I’ve done so far, the Freenas setup is fast enough to edit a video project right from the network with out any problems. It seems like the configuration has more then enough power to handle constant use from my laptop. I’ll run some more tests once the PCI-e 1Gb Ethernet card shows up for my desktop, but so far I’ve very happy with the setup. I think with the right drive configuration this could easily saturate 1Gb Ethernet speeds.
I’ll keep you posted on how the project works out. It’s good to be back.
October 24th, 2012 at 12:54 am
Just a tip regarding getting gigabit link on your nic;
1: Cables! A bad/older cable will definately have big impact here. Make sure you use at least Cat 5e (important with the “e”) , or Cat 6 cables.
2: Link detection. Sometimes products are “incompatible” when doing link negotiation. Try setting to 1000/Full duplex manually (But if you do this at one place, you have to do it at both ends).
3: Switch. Use the bigger brands, like Netgear, Linksys etc. Stay away from the cheapest noname stuff 😉
October 24th, 2012 at 5:19 am
All cat 6 cable, mid range d-link switch, and 1000/Full duplex here. Tested out 2 laptops with good results, it’s just that one desktop NIC that doesn’t want to play nice. A good intel brand pci-e card should take care of the problem. Amazon prime next day shipping to the rescue should find out tonight if that solves the problem.
October 24th, 2012 at 12:02 pm
Welcome back DeeJay … was starting to wonder where you were!
October 24th, 2012 at 5:00 pm
Yea it’s hard to stay current on things when I’m flying all over the place. Glad to be home.
October 24th, 2012 at 4:36 pm
Glad to see you back. Looks like a great build. I’m getting ready to build a new NAS box for the studio. Its going to be 16 tbs with 8tbs as a mirror. I hadn’t though of editing video from the NAS since I’m mostly a still photographer but I do shoot video so I’m interested to see how your editing goes.
The original test box I made from leftover parts is a lot less powerful then yours but managed to stream the same 1080p movie to 9 different devices at different intervals at the same time so I was very happy with the results. I’ve also had mine running for 5 months with no downtime which was another concern for me. So I think I’m ready to invest in a larger server.
Had I known you were in Boston I’d have set up a meeting always looking to network.
October 24th, 2012 at 5:00 pm
The motherboard I went with only supports 4 SATA devices, but once I get files moved over and find out how much space I have left I’ll probably add another 4 port SATA PCI-E card and add a few more 3tb drives. Hopefully the new 4tb drives will push down the 3tb pricing over the next few months. I’ll be running in raidz2 which leaves me with about 5.2tb of usable space (out of 12tb) after formatting. Freenas does support usb drives, so it wouldn’t be to hard to stack a few 2tb drives outside the case if needed.
Just in the limited amount of testing I’ve been able to do, editing directly from the NAS seems to work fine on my laptop. I’ll report back once I’ve installed the new NIC in my desktop system.
Sorry I missed you in Boston, I was down in Salem working at a couple of out door events they had going on, then attended a lecture at MIT. Great food, but what’s the story with all of those dunkin donuts out there?
October 24th, 2012 at 5:29 pm
Haha yeah you know you’ve left New England when you stop seeing a dunkin donuts on every corner. There are 3 within a 2 blocks of my studio. I guess people here love their coffee, I don’t drink coffee so I don’t get the appeal.
If the 3tb drives come down in price ill probably go bigger. I was hoping to get 10 out of 16 for usuable space which might not be possible so going bigger will help. But I’m playing around with running 2 raids within the box so I have a mirror of the first raid. Then ill back that up off location weekly. It’s not perfect but should be a lot more affordable.
May 17th, 2013 at 1:40 pm
Hi – I came across your blog from doing some google research on building a freeNas box. I’ll be using mine for video editing as well but I’m currently trying to decide between Raid-Z1 and Z2 – I was curious if you ever changed over to RaidZ2 and if you noticed a performance difference if so. Most people’s argument against RAIDZ1 seems to be that it can only survive 1 disk failure but I seem to think that for the performance increase of Z1 over Z2 it may be an acceptable risk if you have a remote back up to rebuild the array from (in the case of an unrecoverable two-disk failure). Any thoughts? Thanks!