299 days uptime for a home box. Not bad. The last time it was rebooted, I needed to move it to a different location.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
FreeNAS e-350 uptime
I just checked my FreeNAS RAID. This is a personal RAID I use to store backups, installers and VMs. Here is the original post : http://fortysomethinggeek.blogspot.com/2012/08/freenas-low-power-amd-e-350-lian-li-pc.html .
299 days uptime for a home box. Not bad. The last time it was rebooted, I needed to move it to a different location.
299 days uptime for a home box. Not bad. The last time it was rebooted, I needed to move it to a different location.
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Wouldn't a Celeron (SOC type) be better for a NAS as the AMD E-350 has a weak CPU but good GPU? I guess when you built yours AMD Fusion was the only thing available unless you wanted to use an Atom.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking of using one of these for a NAS:
http://ee.gigabyte.com/products/page/mb/ga-c1037un-eurev_10/
It replaces a similar board which used a Celeron 847.
At the time, celerons didn't come with SIX, 6 sata ports in mini-itx. I don't know if the landscape has change since. Also, at the time, they didn't support more than 4GB RAM.
DeleteI was thinking after I posted my comment that the reason that board was popular was the abundance of sata ports. There was also an AMD C60 board which had enough sata ports for a NAS without using a pci/pci-e card. I don't think the landscape has changed much as that board I posted only has three sata ports :(
DeleteThe HP microservers (AMD CPU)seem popular over here in the UK as they always seem to having cashback offers on them. I am tempted to try one. I could probably sell it for the amount I paid for it!
The C60 and E-350 boards are very cheap; including processor. $80 on sale sometimes at NewEgg. All you need to do is add RAM and storage.
ReplyDelete@forty
ReplyDeleteI am thinking about doing a similar NAS setup to move my vMWare lab to but was kind o put off by all the discussions about freenas/zfs and non-ECC RAM in the freenas forums.
I just saw your post from 2012 and was going to follow up. What are your thoughts on the ECC/non-ECC RAM argument and loosing all your data? Obvisiouly your have been solid for 2 years.
I got an iomega ix2-200 - 1 TB RAID1 I use this for streaming, NFS, iSCSI (at one point) and it cannot keep up running VCSA and my VMs. It screams.
I have 2x Asrock E350 motherboard from my old lab that I want to use for the NAS only 4 SATA but I am ok with that.
Here is my current setup:
2x Zotac A55-itx $90ea ($180)
2x amd a8-6500 $100ea ($200)
2x8 (2x4gb) DDR3 GB RAM - $40ea ($80) bought when RAM was dirt cheap. will be upgrading to 16GB in each host
2x8 GB cruizer small profile - $8ec ($16)
2x broadcom/hp 380nt dual port gLAN (from old setup)
1 x iomega ix2-200 - 1 TB RAID1 I use this for streaming, NFS, iSCSI (at one point) and it cannot keep up running VCSA and my VMs. It screams.
You have to take the ECC, Non-ECC RAM into context.
DeleteThis is not an enterprise build for production. It doesn't have dual power supplies. It is not server grade.
Moreover, I am not providing SAN/iDISK services to live production servers.
This is also not a final definitive backup system. Rather, I use it as a shuttle pool in the event one of my other three backups crash.
I have four backups of everything. I learn that lesson a long time ago.
Having said that, I've had zero problems with my set-up except for the first bad disk a while back.
We have over 60TB of storage running on IBM DS3400/DS3500. Each brick cost around $15,000 and have about 9-14TB RAID6 depending on when we got them.
Each firmware locked 1-2TB Enterprise 7200 rpm drives cost $800-900 each. One drive cost more than my entire FreeNAS box.
"Those" are production level RAIDS with 24/7 365 days a year on-site support. A drive failed on Thanksgiving or Christmas and IBM sends out a replacement in 2 hours.
That is what you call production, enterprise level storage. As a home user, I can't afford a $15-30K RAID system. FreeNAS has allowed me to explore and experiment.
I've installed FreeNAS on production Dell 1U and 2U R4,5 and 700 series servers w/ ECC RAM. With those, I still use 4 way backups.
Would I use this for my home lab? Definitely. I run iSCSI on my test ESXI server all the time. I also happen to have multiple backups of my VM images and never experience any corruption.
If you want ECC. Lenovo sells an i3 ThinkServer that takes ECC pretty cheap ($220). The Fuji MX130S2 servers I got year have 4 sata and takes ECC. They're pretty cheap as well.
@forty, Thanks for the input. Much appreciated. Sadly I am not looking for any protection beyond RAIDZ1/Z2 right now. No plans for multiple backups. Going Cheapo but the ECC argument is making me re-think my build plan.
DeleteYeah I don't expect it to be enterprise. Over my career I have managed several NetApp FAS 2040/3140 and EMC VNX5000 series SAN. Enterprise is hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars. After 4-5 years when support expires it starts all over again because its cheaper to do a hardware refresh with including support than pay for support alone.
I'll check out the Lenovo/Fujitsu. Right now Synology/QNap are way too pricey.
Keep up the good work with this blog.
Rob