Friday, April 20, 2012
NAS4free - Minor GUI Improvement
I love NAS4Free GUI. It shows information I am interested in and is highly usable. A minor change (removal of an outer frame below the toolbar) makes the GUI cleaner. Here is an animated show with before/after examples.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Hardware, New Iteration
Here is my new NAS box:
Setup ssh.
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 65nm E4300 Allendale 1.8GHz 800MHz FSB LGA 775 65W
- Motherboard: MSI G41M-P25 with Intel G41 video, Intel ICH7 south bridge with 4x SATA2 ports and Realtek 8111DL gigabit Ethernet controller.
- RAM: 2x4GB DDR3 1333mhz PC3-10666
- HBA: I am playing with HDs connected to motherboard's ICH7. I also have an IBM M1015 (with cables) re-flashed to LSI9211-IT.
- HDs:
mirror of 2xSeagate Barracuda Green 2TB ST2000DL003,
assorted drives for tests, all in this 4-bay and this 3-bay rack. Fan controlled by this gadget. - DVDROM: attached only for new installation, not enough external bays to have it full time.
- PSU: Antec EarthWatts Green EA-380D Green 380W
- Case: Cooler Master Gladiator 600
- UPS: APC BACK-UPS ES BE550G connected to USB port
Setup ssh.
Sunday, April 8, 2012
NAS4Free, Take2, Success!
I fixed it! That Samba crash I had while reading data from NAS - it is fixed!
I recreated mirror zpool, redid all CIFS/SMB settings, recreated shares, restarted the service and it just works! Let me dig deeper to figure out what exactly had the effect!
I recreated mirror zpool, redid all CIFS/SMB settings, recreated shares, restarted the service and it just works! Let me dig deeper to figure out what exactly had the effect!
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Open Indiana, Take2
While nas4free is being solidified - samba crash there takes all the wind out of my excitement - I am giving another try to (Samba-free!) OpenIndiana 151a. I have very high hopes for kernel-based CIFS support. This time a new storage adapter (IBM M1015 re-flashed to LSI9211-IT) is plugged in but not connected - the cables are still on a slow boat from China.
As before, the default install pukes on X boot. Choosing VESA helps. More than that, this time it just boots in native 1280x1024! Last time I spent hours trying to achieve this. And now it just happens with no effort on my part. This time I also have a pair of Barracuda Greens connected. My plan is to create a mirrored zpool and check out file transfer speeds between NAS and Windows 7 htpc. I will take another shot at enabling SMART and SpeedStep!
As before, the default install pukes on X boot. Choosing VESA helps. More than that, this time it just boots in native 1280x1024! Last time I spent hours trying to achieve this. And now it just happens with no effort on my part. This time I also have a pair of Barracuda Greens connected. My plan is to create a mirrored zpool and check out file transfer speeds between NAS and Windows 7 htpc. I will take another shot at enabling SMART and SpeedStep!
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Sanity Checks
Nas4free seems to be most suited to my requirements, but samba there just crashes on me. In the meantime I am collecting network and hard drives throughput data on Windows.
HTPC runs Windows 7, NAS in this test runs Windows Vista. Both use Intel 82540EM PRO/1000 MT PCI NICs.
Rate of data copying between two internal SATA2 drives on HTPC: windows copy dialog shows 120MB/sec in the beginning of the copy process. By the end it falls down to 87MB/sec.
Writing to NAS (to 300MB Seagate HD) is done at a rate of 43MB/sec.
Reading from NAS is done at a rate of 40MB/sec.
iperf bandwidth measurement between HTPC and another Windows PC is about 38MB/sec. Enabling jumbo frames (or changing their size from 4k to 9k) has no effect at all. I have no idea why the bandwidth is so low. I ordered a CAT6 cable and will try one more time bandwidth tests with two windows PCs connected directly with no switch in between.
EDIT: later I determined that PCI NICs are the bottleneck!
Todo:
While waiting for the production version of firmware to materialize and production HBA to show up on my door step I was pondering over the hard drive use strategy. Should I go with RAIDZ? Given that the NAS cage can hold up to 4 drivers, and I do not plan to expand, my options are limited to RAIDZ and MIRROR. Here are two good articles on the subject. Decided! I will go with a mirror of two Barracuda Green 2TB drives.
HTPC runs Windows 7, NAS in this test runs Windows Vista. Both use Intel 82540EM PRO/1000 MT PCI NICs.
Rate of data copying between two internal SATA2 drives on HTPC: windows copy dialog shows 120MB/sec in the beginning of the copy process. By the end it falls down to 87MB/sec.
Writing to NAS (to 300MB Seagate HD) is done at a rate of 43MB/sec.
Reading from NAS is done at a rate of 40MB/sec.
iperf bandwidth measurement between HTPC and another Windows PC is about 38MB/sec. Enabling jumbo frames (or changing their size from 4k to 9k) has no effect at all. I have no idea why the bandwidth is so low. I ordered a CAT6 cable and will try one more time bandwidth tests with two windows PCs connected directly with no switch in between.
EDIT: later I determined that PCI NICs are the bottleneck!
Todo:
- install syslog on the LAN to collect debugging info, e.g. syslog-win32
- Experiment with Wake-on-LAN - here is client which would wake NAS up.
While waiting for the production version of firmware to materialize and production HBA to show up on my door step I was pondering over the hard drive use strategy. Should I go with RAIDZ? Given that the NAS cage can hold up to 4 drivers, and I do not plan to expand, my options are limited to RAIDZ and MIRROR. Here are two good articles on the subject. Decided! I will go with a mirror of two Barracuda Green 2TB drives.
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