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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

input on FreeNAS archive store?

Started using FreeNas about 8 years ago and is very pleased. Works great. My only concern is if you plan to build your own server with many drives and raid that will be up all the time, you need to see if the disk have "enterprise" or "server" written on it. If not they can after some hundreds of hours go offline and need a reboot to start responding again, and this will make raids think they have problem and can trigger failsafe in backwards ways when the drives really are fine. If you can reboot every other day, you can get some awesome performance at very low cost.
 
Why not consider a QNap? Not much more expensive to get started, expansion is reasonable and the software & configuration is done for you. Plus they're 10GBe capable for moving all that Dragon footy around :)
 
QNap is a finished product with both software and hardware. The benefit it is done for you. Just start using.
FreeNas is just software at zero cost, you can put all money in to getting many drives and massive amount of storage.
 
Started using FreeNas about 8 years ago and is very pleased. Works great. My only concern is if you plan to build your own server with many drives and raid that will be up all the time, you need to see if the disk have "enterprise" or "server" written on it. If not they can after some hundreds of hours go offline and need a reboot to start responding again, and this will make raids think they have problem and can trigger failsafe in backwards ways when the drives really are fine. If you can reboot every other day, you can get some awesome performance at very low cost.
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Would I have the same consideration if I wasn't using RAID?

Why not consider a QNap? Not much more expensive to get started, expansion is reasonable and the software & configuration is done for you. Plus they're 10GBe capable for moving all that Dragon footy around :)
Click to expand...

I have... I've used them as well. Startup cost for a 24-bay is preeeeetty steep next to the thousand or so I'd throw into a FreeNAS, kinda like JanneJansson is suggesting. I can always add a 10GBe card as well to the FreeNAS if needed.
 
JanneJansson said:
Started using FreeNas about 8 years ago and is very pleased. Works great. My only concern is if you plan to build your own server with many drives and raid that will be up all the time, you need to see if the disk have "enterprise" or "server" written on it. If not they can after some hundreds of hours go offline and need a reboot to start responding again, and this will make raids think they have problem and can trigger failsafe in backwards ways when the drives really are fine. If you can reboot every other day, you can get some awesome performance at very low cost.
Click to expand...

Hi Janne!

Thanks for sharing.

I was under the impression that this problem was negated because ZFS is basically a software Raid. And this is why you can use even cheap WD Green drives on it, if one wishes. Do you happen to have a link so I can read more about this issue?

Also can you share how many drives you are using in your system Janne? and did you go with RAIDZ2 ? Or striped vdevs?
 
Depends how you value your time I guess. QNAP 851 is $1200 at NCIX. Gets you going with 56TB in Raid 5, then about $900 for their expander for each time you need another 8 bays.
 
Trevor Meier said:
Depends how you value your time I guess. QNAP 851 is $1200 at NCIX. Gets you going with 56TB in Raid 5, then about $900 for their expander for each time you need another 8 bays.
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True! Didn't know about the expanders until today. That's a good way to go as well. HOWEVER -
* I'd be a little bit concerned about putting eight 8TB drives in a RAID5. Little too dangerous for my taste.
* For 56TB I'd have to get the 8TB HGST enterprise drives (the only 8TB listed as supported by qnap) - and each of those drives are literally a thousand dollars. Each. And as I've found with qnap, as soon as they hear you are using an officially unsupported drive, you can kiss your tech support goodbye :P

Again, currently, I don't really need a RAID, or even ZFS - I'm finding that out as I get feedback and clarifying my goals.

There's two things going on here. What I really just need is a bunch of bays to load up a bunch of individual drives: slower, cheaper. I think the assumption from post pros is that a video guy necessarily needs an enterprise-class SAN to work off of, and nothing else will quite do the job. I get that, but I'm not quite there yet- and that's the second thing I'd want - later, though, when my workflow demands it.

If I can load up my drives for a grand now, it's a lot easier for me to justify dumping a crap ton of coin later on a massive (or at least upgradeable) SAN with 10GBe etc that fulfills its own purpose - fast, reliable working storage - but is massive overkill for archive access. I figure there must be a reliable way to access a neat row or drives, inexpensively, if I'm willing to give up fast access and RAID.
 
I would suggest waiting for the TVS-871 which has dual expansion ports and retails for under $1500 for the i3 4GB model. You can always upgrade CPU and mem later.

This way you can install 10GbE cards (not sure how successful link aggregation is on Mac) or do one 10GbE card and one expansion card to allow for the 10 Bay REXP-1000 Pro which has a SAS connection to the TVS-871. This gives you 18 Drives, 10GbE throughput and further expandability (the REXP has an additional SAS port for more units) for under $3500 (cards included). There's a rack version of each of those if you prefer that arrangement. This nets you 60+TB in Raid 6 config for under $7K if you factor in 4TB NAS drives.
 
Heck, I say go for it. Try it out with your current hardware and see how it works. Check out the reviews though - those fans are nasty loud.

Since what you're looking for is single-drive access you could also just consider small USB-3 enclosures and hook them up directly to a mac mini or similar. Skip the NAS software.
 
Ryan Schroeder said:
THOWEVER -
* I'd be a little bit concerned about putting eight 8TB drives in a RAID5. Little too dangerous for my taste.
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I'd be concerned about using RAID5 at all - If I recall, the probability of losing the entire array if it's quite frequently used is over 90% after a few years (the probability of a single drive dying is very high, and then rebuilding the array takes a long time and puts more stress on the remaining drives, making the chance of a second failure while before the array has been rebuild quite likely. Since it can only sustain one drive failing at once, your array is hosed if that happens).

RAID6 on the other hand has a much better chance because the likelihood of three drives failing at once is quite low (somewhere near 5% after three to five years or something if I remember correctly from some analysis I read?).

But remember, RAID is not designed as a backup solution and you can't rely on it. It's designed for availability or performance (or both), so keep proper backups.
 
Yup. I've dreamed of putting one of these puppies together ever since v.1 came out. With 8TB drives that 360TB in one box... mmmmmm....
 
Trevor Meier said:
Yup. I've dreamed of putting one of these puppies together ever since v.1 came out. With 8TB drives that 360TB in one box... mmmmmm....
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Guy on reddit said the following... search sounds great to me.
Ive built 4 of them right now and we use them to archive 140 TV show's at the same time as laying off to LTO. There is no comparable bang-for-the-buck.
You can choose drive's/mobo/processor/ethernet configs for different uses. For LTO archiving i have a SuperMicro X9SCL with an i3, 32gb ECC ram, running FreeNAS, doing AFP & NFS shares over 1gbe. For my Resolve and Smoke stations they get dual processor xeon's with 256gb's of ECC ram and quad port 10gbe.
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