What NAS OS?

[jamesdsimone]

I'm building a storage from left over parts from old computer. The specs are the following.

FX8350
600 watt PS
ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0
32GB DDR3 1866
RADEON R5 240
4 2TB red drives that I took from an old USB enclosure that stopped working.
4 4TB Seagate Constellation ES.3 drives

Suggestions on an OS? I want to install the OS to a thumb drive. I have a server with Xigmanas installed to a thumb drive and it works well. I was thinking of trying something new. I tried using Ubuntu and Mint but getting the Sanba share to work was impossible despite reading a dozen+ tutorials.

 

[jamesdsimone]

FYI I was just playing around with my old Phenom 2 720 with Windows XP. I was reenabling the network connections and the XigmaNAS showed up on the list. I connected and I was able to access the 4TB drives. So XigmaNAS lets WinXP bypass the 2 TB drive limit. Nice.

 

[Shmee]

How does XigmaNAS compare to Truenas/Freenas? What are your thoughts on it in general? I know that more recent versions of Freenas say to not use USB drives though.

 

[jamesdsimone]

The HP Microserver I have has 4 bays. It came with a 250GB hard drive but I didn't want to use a bay for a boot drive so I installed to a 32GB thumb drive. The specs are pretty weak but it works as a file server

MicroServer features the latest dual core 1.3GHz AMD Athlon II processors, PC3 DDR3 memory, 2 DIMM slots, 2 MB cache, and up to 8GB of memory.

XigmaNAS says it needs 8GB minimum but it runs fine with 4GB. But I'm not using any higher functions. The server came with 2 GB of memory. I had an extra set of 2x2GB that I threw in. I never tried Truenas/Freenas so don't know.
The current server build has 8 SATA connectors. I want to stick with a USB boot drive.

 

[jamesdsimone]

I tried EasyNAS and the installation failed. TrueNAS say not to install in a thumb drive. I think I'll go with XigmaNAS again.
Maybe try ZFS?

 

[VirtualLarry]

features the latest dual core 1.3GHz AMD Athlon II processors

In 2022 that phrase gives me a chuckle. "latest...Athlon II"

 

[mxnerd]

NethServer? Current version is 7.9

But 8.x will be different, with awesome multi nodes support.

NethServer 8, application platform for Hybrid Cloud – NethServer

www.nethserver.org

 

[Shmee]

I tried EasyNAS and the installation failed. TrueNAS say not to install in a thumb drive. I think I'll go with XigmaNAS again.
Maybe try ZFS?

Does XigmaNAS not use ZFS by default? Or does it have other options? (ZFS being the type of filesystem, not the OS)

 

[jamesdsimone]

I don't remember from the last time I set it up. The HP microserver only has 4GB of ram so not enough for ZFS. I used UFS instead. I don't think there is a default just multiple options. There is an advanced ZFS installer maybe that uses ZFS default.

 

[jamesdsimone]

Nethserver looks like you install on top of any standard Linux distribution? I have no idea what multi node support is but sounds great.

 

[Fallen Kell]

I tried EasyNAS and the installation failed. TrueNAS say not to install in a thumb drive. I think I'll go with XigmaNAS again.
Maybe try ZFS?

TrueNAS does not want you to install to a thumb drive because thumb drives are notoriously bad for OS installations if any kind of logging is enabled. SATADoms are surprisingly still a recommended use for the OS, however, they suffer the same problem, which most people get around by purchasing 3 or 4 of the same model and make a config backup after installation. Once one fails, they simply pop in another one, run the base installer and restore the config from backup.

Personally, I run my TrueNAS as a VM via XPC-ng (installed on a mirror of 2 Samsung 860 EVO SSDs), and I simply setup the VM with passthrough of my SAS controllers/HBAs to the TrueNAS VM.

I would avoid ZFS if you do not have ECC memory. It uses the RAM as a buffer and any error introduced by the RAM will be propagated to the hard drives, corrupting the data (my server has 192GB of ECC RAM of which I passed 80GB to the TrueNAS VM, but you really don't need more than 4-8, as the recommendations say because it is simply using that as a read/write buffer). ZFS is otherwise an awesome filesystem (and the reason why I am using TrueNAS). I have been using ZFS for almost 20 years now, ever since it was developed and released by Sun Microsystems on Solaris 10.

 

[jamesdsimone]

I installed XigmaNAS and it is up and running. Their recommended install is embedded to a USB thumb drive. I have 4 old 2TB drives that I pulled from a USB enclosure that died. I installed them and formatted to UFS. I will be using them as backup storage for my mp4 files. So ZFS isn't really necessary. I have 1000+ DVD's transcoded so I want them backed up. The server has 4 open hot swap bays that I haven't filled yet. I have some spare 4TB drives that I can use but I also am seeing refurbished 6TB drives start to show up. Newegg has refurbished WD 6TB Gold drives for 60USD and Seagate Exos 6TB drives for 75USB. I have had really good luck with refurbished drives from Newegg. I have bought a number of refurbished Seagate Constellation ES.3 drives and some of them were new with zero hours being reported by Speccy. I assume that companies have moved to much bigger drives and sold off their "small" drives that they never used.

 

[Fallen Kell]

I have bought a number of refurbished Seagate Constellation E.3 drives and some of them were new with zero hours being reported by Speccy. I assume that companies have moved to much bigger drives and sold off their "small" drives that they never used.

They were probably spares they had in case they saw a failure and never had a chance to use before they outright replaced with larger disks. Good finds when you happen to get them.

 

[jamesdsimone]

Exactly what I was thinking. Quick look on Newegg and they have 22TB drives now. If you are managing a large data array a 4 TB drive is essentially useless at this point. I remember having some old IDE drives 130MB yes MB's, a 420MB even 6.4GB's, I tossed them. They weren't worth the bay space. I can imaging a big company might keep dozens or even 100's of spare drives so I'm sure a lot went unused.

 

[Shmee]

4TB is fine, depending on how many you have in the array and how much storage you need. My 5x 4TB WD Red Pros are still doing well for this purpose, in "Raid" Z1. I think I still have about 80% or so space free on the volume. But yes, drives are getting larger capacity now for sure.

I also have 4x MX500 2TB drives in a 1+0 volume.

 

[jamesdsimone]

I don't need any more storage right now so I'll probably wait and see when 6 TB drives drop in price.

 

[Shmee]

Yeah, if you have 4TB drives in your array and they are healthy, and you have enough room for now, then that is fine and don't worry. Only thing is, when/if you do upgrade, I would probably go ahead and and go with 8TB drives at least, I think 8TB to 12TB may be the next sweet spot. I doubt 6TB drives would be a worthwhile upgrade, and may be more $ per TB. But of course this depends on the prices and deals, and what is to come.

 

[jamesdsimone]

Yeah, if you have 4TB drives in your array and they are healthy, and you have enough room for now, then that is fine and don't worry. Only thing is, when/if you do upgrade, I would probably go ahead and and go with 8TB drives at least, I think 8TB to 12TB may be the next sweet spot. I doubt 6TB drives would be a worthwhile upgrade, and may be more $ per TB. But of course this depends on the prices and deals, and what is to come.

I have 4 file sharing NAS's now with a total of 18 drive bays, 4 of which are open. I'm using 8 2TB WD red drives right now. They are small by today's standards but when I installed them maybe 8 years ago they were reasonably sized and I had computers running XP that I needed to connect to. I still have one but XigmaNAS let's XP see and use big drives. I'm good with space right now but I'm going to be transcoding again and I use very high settings so a DVD comes out between 3-4 GB so with backup copy that will take up a lot of space. 4TB drives are still the sweet spot dollars/GB. Refurbed 4TB Seagate Constellation ES.1 less than 50USD.

 

[Shmee]

So I noticed that freenas is complaining that the certificate has expired. How do I renew this? Do I need to update to Truenas? I am currently on Freenas 11.3 stable, haven't really had a reason to upgrade so far, everything has been pretty stable. Are there any new advantages to upgrading to Truenas, such as better VM support or overall performance or something? Everything seems to work fine now.

 

[Fallen Kell]

I would upgrade to TrueNAS. I finally did that about 1-2 months ago. The reason to upgrade isn't so much performance etc., it is simply to be on the actively developed and maintained platform. Freenas has been end of life since December 2020 (end of support is December 2023). It was a pretty painless update for me at least.

 

[Shmee]

Sounds reasonable, would that fix the certificate issue?

 

[Fallen Kell]

In theory if you update the part of the system that has the expired cert it should. But I don't know what cert is expired on your system (i.e. the https cert?). I suspect that is the cert that is expired, which needs to be updated separately (the OS update will keep your current configuration settings for the most part). You need to click on "System -> CAs -> Add" and create a new Internal Cert Authority certificate. Then you need to update your system to use that new Cert Authority cert via "System -> Certificates -> Add", select new "Internal Certificate", and select the new "Signing Certificate Authority" to the one you just created.