For the last month I’ve been lacking a NAS. It’s not that the previous setup broke, it’s just the fact that the machine that was hosting the TrueNAS service is SO loud and SO power hungry – it’s an older server, Fujitsu RX300 S3, to be exact. Dual 771 socket, 2U form factor and 8GB worth of FB-DIMMs. With temperatures higher than surface of the Sun in my room I say “stop” to old and “welcome” to NAS server version… Uhm… 5? 6? Whatever, it doesn’t matter, I will call it “FreeNAS”, because I want to build a machine only with parts I already have.
Motherboard/CPU/RAM: H81M-P33 with a Celeron G1840 and 4GB of 1333MHz CL9 DDR3L RAM. Newest I have while also being relatively low power.
Disks: 4x 500GB of spinning rust. These are directly taken from the Fujitsu server, before installation I will check them with MHDD. These drives are NOT really a good choice for a NAS environment, but I already had them and I don’t need reliability beyond RAID5.
Build looks… not very nice, but having to work with case almost as old as I am doesn’t really make cable management any easier, and same goes for HDD placement. Only good thing is that I don’t have a side panel, so nothing should thermally throttle.
As for the PSU it’s again not a good choice for a NAS, for example it doesn’t have any sort of 80+ certificate, but again, it’s what I had.
Specs aren’t the best, but it will do for a home NAS.
S.M.A.R.T. readings don’t show any problems with drives, except for attribute 187, which usually indicateds old age type of wear. It’s fine for my usecase, but I wouldn’t trust any of these drives with sensitive data.
That’s scan of the surface of the worst drive. Again, fine for me, unusable for important things.
Time to install TrueNAS. I’ve used this software since it was still called “FreeNAS” for years at this point, without any major problems.
Surely enough, problems start right away. USB stick wasn’t imaged properly.
Second time’s the charm. I have set up a static IP for the server and that’s essetially everything from the bare metal side. Time to go to the Web UI.
That’s what I like to see. I generally like the GUI of TrueNAS, it’s modern, slick, informative and very easy to use.
TrueNAS also provides a pretty good documentation, but when I was making tutorials for EXT_CLK some people were complaining about lack of pictures showing certain steps of progress and I think that is the main problem with TrueNAS’ instructions. They’re great when You have general knowledge of UNIX systems or previous experience with TrueNAS, but for a “Windows normie” they can be a bit confusing at times.
I’m using RAID-Z1, which is essentially a ZFS RAID5.
Activated SMB share and added a user, essentially everything You need for a simple NAS.
Windows is able to connect to the server, so time to test it.
For the time I’ve been managing this website I’ve always used a cable when transfering pictures from my phone to the PC. I no longer will need it with a simple trick: folder cloning – I will use a “Foldersync” app to dump DCIM folder onto the NAS.
So far so good, I can sync that folder without any problems. Time for some optimizations, and by that I mean I only need one thing – HDD spindown.
Unfortunately TrueNAS doesn’t spindown disks due almost constant S.M.A.R.T. readings, so You need an extenal sctipt. I used this script and setup an init command, per instructions.
But then my heart broke in half. First catastrophical issue happened.
I couldn’t copy any files larger than ~5GB.
After a while I read that it’s a common issue and it has it roots in incompatibility of RTL8111 ethernet controller and BSD, system on which TrueNAS is base.
This hasn’t been an issue for me ever before since I always was using it on server hardware – RX300 S3, DL380 G6 or Poweredge 2950, they all have either Broadcom or Intel NICs.
Just to be sure I installed another instance of TrueNAS with 16GB of RAM, 2 different HDDs and on Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 that I repaired previously. Issue happened again.
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So, what now.
I can either dump “FreeNAS” or dump TrueNAS.
With a heavy heart I parted ways with TrueNAS and welcomed… OMV.
I have been daily driving various flavours of linux on my laptop, but never ‘clean’ Debian. Will need to put in on my ToDo list.
First look and… Eh… It’s OK, I guess. Configurable, at least.
This is my first time with openmediavault, so far so good.
After a few minutes of just poking around I got to the S.M.A.R.T. readings.
Great. OMV detects the 187 attribute as a predicted failure. Whatever, doesn’t matter.
BTW, OMV feels VERY barebones and unintuitive compared to TrueNAS. To get software RAID You need to install at least 2 plugins. And You have to do it via SSH, there is no “internal” terminal, again unlike TrueNAS.
Also, server suffered a power interrupt mid syncing and didn’t automatically continue afterwards. I had to manually SSH into it and input a command to restart it. If that happens to all resyncing situations then I think this is a very bad design choice.
After painfully long time of syncing (why sync freshly wiped drives?) RAID5-ed drives I finally managed to make a shared folder and attached it to SMB share.
Then I had to again SSH to it to setup HD-Idle, since internal spindown feature had too long spin time for me. I will access this NAS maybe once a day, probably even less. 3 minutes is long enough for my usecase.
It’s done. Time to test it.
It works! I don’t get any problems while copying bigger files and RAM usage is at about 1GB. This isn’t particularly good comparison since ZFS uses RAM as cache, but still.
I’m going to test it more over the following weeks, but so far so good. Project FreeNAS is ALIVE!
Thanks for reading!