NAS Backup

[Timman_24]

You just couldn't resist buying a 256GB SSD could you? I have purchased a few of these Crucial M4 drives and they have been good thus far. I have them in various notebooks and those systems fly with those drives in them.

I know, I saw them for sale for 189 on the website and decided to just go for it when I got to the store. It actually comes out about the same as buying another 2x1TB HDDs for the server. Now I get to repurpose my PC drives as server drives. The point of the server was to offload storage from my main PC to a central location that everyone can access without having to run my main rig 24/7 (which is very power hungry.) I'll only keep games and programs on my computer now.

But yes, it turned out quite nice

[Timman_24]

I tried openindiana. I installed the OS and then tried to install napp-it, but on restart hadn't installed anything. Help showed that I may have been booting to a previous state or something, but eh. Now I'm installing nexentastor. I'm not liking how I have to install using a CD. I wish they had a bootable install USB option. The VMware looks painless, but I don't have that set up.

[Timman_24]

I got it up and running. I have a few questions for you guys though. With compression on, I'm only getting around 30MB/s on write. Does this sound about right? I'm writing movies, so they are large files, not a bunch of small files.

My setup is:
1x320GB HDD for system
2x1TB RAIDZ1

Compression on, dedup off

I wrote a smaller work load much faster, ~110MB/s. When ordered the server to write 60GB worth of movies, it went to 30MB/s, and I lost access to the GUI web interface. I'm guessing I am running into RAM issues. I think I may buy 2x40GB SSDs for a mirrored system drive and buy another 8GB of RAM for 16GB total.

Any suggestions?

[James]

I got it up and running. I have a few questions for you guys though. With compression on, I'm only getting around 30MB/s on write. Does this sound about right? I'm writing movies, so they are large files, not a bunch of small files.

My setup is:
1x320GB HDD for system
2x1TB RAIDZ1

Compression on, dedup off

I wrote a smaller work load much faster, ~110MB/s. When ordered the server to write 60GB worth of movies, it went to 30MB/s, and I lost access to the GUI web interface. I'm guessing I am running into RAM issues. I think I may buy 2x40GB SSDs for a mirrored system drive and buy another 8GB of RAM for 16GB total.

Any suggestions?

1. It's the compression that will be consuming all of the RAM and is probably your choke point (this depends on the type of compression used and is a guess.) If you turn it off (or make another share with it turned off in a different folder) does it go faster?

2. Extra RAM should help.

3. This is via CIFS I'm assuming? (SMB/CIFS share from Windows system). If so, you might not see much more than that. The chattiness of the old SMB1 protocol really limits transfer speeds. The newer SMB2 helps a lot, but it is still Windows only (with Samba4 alpha being the unstable exception).

[Timman_24]

I've got it working with compression at ~100MB/s with large files now.

EDIT: I got that stuff worked out

I'm now migrating a bunch of files over. I tested the redundancy by pulling a drive out. I reattached the drive and it rebuilt the pool fine. I was still able to access files and change them with the drive down, so that was nice. I wish the GUI let you know with big flashing lights though. The fault is kind of buried in the UI.

All I have to do now is set a backup to an external drive and I'll be all set. Its nice having all my files off of my computer. The permissions were strange, but I think I got it mostly figured out. It is funny how my MacBook Pro makes it easier than Windows 7 to set up a CIFS share...

[Vindir]

Did you add more ram or find something else that was bottle-necking your speed?

[Timman_24]

Did you add more ram or find something else that was bottle-necking your speed?

Well... the movies I was transferring were on a USB 2.0 device... I'm not totally 1Gbe on my network. I've got that wifi bridge, so computers from my house only see ~7MB/s which is saturating the wifi link. From computers connected via CAT6 through my Gbe switch, they see 100-110MB/s.

I haven't tested simultaneous read/writes from multiple computers yet. I'm working to figure out how to set up USB backups now. I was also wondering if it was possible to rsync with amazon s3. I'd love to do that with my critical documents on a weekly basis.

[Vindir]

Check out the root shell. http://greg.porter.name/wordpress/?p=646

Could set the rsync up as a cron job there. Might need to figure out UUIDs and add some bash scripting to handle failures when the drive isn't hooked up.