FreeNAS 8 - Settings?

[Rick Sanchez]

Hey,

I have finally finished building my FreeNAS box, currently running FreeNAS 8.

I'm looking for some advise before I start loading all of my files. I have six 2tb drives installed in my NAS box.

I'm not sure which ZFS file system to use; I will be backing up system images using rsync once I've looked into it - my computer & media center.

I will be storing all of my important downloaded applications, business files including my websites and my university work (September) on the NAS.

When bigger hard drives are released and are cheap enough I will be swapping the drives (2tb > 4tb etc) or in the event of a drive failure. Automatic rebuilding is essential for me. If a drive fails it will be replaced within two days, no later.

Which ZFS file system should I use?

Mirror
Stripe
RAID-Z
RAID-Z2

I will be backing my university work online as well, on my cloud and dropbox.

Regards,
Jon

[wulliec]

Are you going to use iSCSI fella?
I've just been pissing about with FreeNAS 8 (release and latest beta) and the iSCSI is terrible and constantly crashes to the point where you can't use it anymore without rebuilding the entire FreeNAS. I've moved to OpenFiler instead. I found version 8 to be a terrible release all in.
this is the ticket I opened with them
http://support.freenas.org/ticket/255#comment:7
Just a heads up.

[Rick Sanchez]

No I don't think I will, but can you clarify what is iSCSI lol

[Rick Sanchez]

What should the permissions be set at so I (the only user - my pc & media center) can add/edit/delete files/folders etc

[Rick Sanchez]

Sorted that but my Freenas box keeps dropping off my windows pc (to view) but I can access via web

Any ideas?

[Over Carl]

Are you going to use iSCSI fella?
I've just been pissing about with FreeNAS 8 (release and latest beta) and the iSCSI is terrible and constantly crashes to the point where you can't use it anymore without rebuilding the entire FreeNAS. I've moved to OpenFiler instead. I found version 8 to be a terrible release all in.
this is the ticket I opened with them
http://support.freenas.org/ticket/255#comment:7
Just a heads up.

I just remembered that one of the reasons I backed away from an openfiler test a couple of years ago - I was reading random reports on their forums of files going missing.

That and terrible raid 5 performance as I couldn't afford a hardware raid card, using onboard with cpu doing the work was also seriously crap.

It did however integrate with AD after a bit of messing around with group context which is why I picked it over freenas for that experiment.

[wulliec]

Sorted that but my Freenas box keeps dropping off my windows pc (to view) but I can access via web

Any ideas?

My FreeNAS 7.2 does this periodically. It just seems to be one of those things with it. the network interface drops for a second and, although the web interface is responsive, NFS shares (and iSCSI) don't come back for a few more minutes
I guess that's why it's free!

[Rick Sanchez]

Ok thanks mate