Building Freenas box to work with PCH and My Lil Movie Jukebox

[Casuall]

You may ask why am I building a Freenas and what is it for. Freenas is free software for setting up a home built Network Attached Storage Device or NAS out of most any old PC or Mac laying around the house. You can use it as a server on your Network and store all your files on it. If you set it to run RAID 1 it will automatically copy all stored files from one drive to a mirror drive and if one fails you simply replace the failed drive and it will recopy the files to the replaced hard drive. This way I can Rip once and it will make a copy of everything I do.
I am building it because after using two external 1TB hard drives to store movies on I feared they might crash. I had a back up system of using DVDs but found they don't hold their information permanently. For some unknown reason they develop errors after being stored so long, scratched, cracked, or broken. So, if a hard drive crashes and the DVDs have errors it would be hell taking the time to recreate all those movies. It will also play all your movies on the Popcorn Hour.

I'm building the Freenas server from an old eMachine T5010 with a basic Intel Pentium 4 processor, 758MB DDR Ram, 10/100Mbps LAN, 200GB hard drive, and stock motherboard. I will be using RAID 1 mirroring with two 1TB drive to start and a New case to put 8 hard drive in later on as I buy them. So for I have gutted the eMachine and put everything into a new Logisys Ruby Red Mini Tower w/480W Power Supply (Microcenter $35) and installed two HITACHI 1TB 3.5 SATA 7200 RPM drives (Microcenter $59). So far the Freenas total cost is only about $155.00 which is cheap if you have ever priced a Name Brand Network Attached Storage box (NAS).
Now this is where I am looking for some input. You may wonder why I am not using 2, 2TB hard drive and here is my reason. I have read about many people having trouble getting the larger 2TB, and 1.5TB hard drive to work properly with their NAS servers so I decided to use the smaller ones for now. If you have had a different experience than please comment below.

I have two A-110 Popcorn Hours with hard drives installed. One has a 320GB 3.5, and the other has a 250GB 2.5 hard drive. They are both shared on my network with a HP Pavilion Elite m9357c HTPC which is where I run My Lil Movie Juke box (MLMJB). I also have Movie Collectorz to work with MLMJB.

I will be posting as I continue building me Freenas and learning from the input I get from this forum. Hopefully you guys can help me as I go along and I can help those of you who might want to try this with your system.

If I have posted this in the wrong section someone let me know where is is supposed to be and I will fix it.

[nuke12]

A couple of threads you might consider reading;

http://www.networkedmediatank.com/showth...?tid=45481
http://www.networkedmediatank.com/showth...?tid=36275

[Casuall]

(02-16-2011 02:53 PM)nuke12 Wrote:  A couple of threads you might consider reading;

http://www.networkedmediatank.com/showth...?tid=45481
http://www.networkedmediatank.com/showth...?tid=36275

Great threads to expand on my discovery of DVDs failing to keep their data intact. Curious to know why you gave up on Freenas because of the ZFS setup failing. I think a read that it was in beta still and needed to be further developed.

[buba013]

Good luck with the build.

ZFS is better in 8.** with a revamped gui just working out some bugs but its now programed by i different group they still release it but also use it in production systems.

go have a good read about raid 1 and see how many drive you can add better of going raid 5 or ZFS if you want data redundancy "but that is your chose".

but openmediavault should be good once it is released( same programmer that took over freenas many years ago before it to ixsystems) .

been a freenas user since 6.8

fyi my frenas systems can stream blu-ray iso's on smb no problems but does depend on hardware.

[nuke12]

(02-16-2011 08:56 PM)Casuall Wrote:  Great threads to expand on my discovery of DVDs failing to keep their data intact. Curious to know why you gave up on Freenas because of the ZFS setup failing. I think a read that it was in beta still and needed to be further developed.

I liked FreeNAS. Still do. I think ZFS is still not mature enough in FreeNAS to be reliable. I can't comment on the regular raid levels in FreeNAS because I never tried them. I simply decided that if I was going to use regular raid levels, I would fall back to an OS that I knew much better and that also had reliable raid levels. FreeNAS + ZFS was the second system that screwed up on me and I lost all my data. Both times I had to rebuild from my blu-ray backups.

I have nothing bad to say about my current Linux system except it took much more work to setup then FreeNAS. I've also replaced drives in it twice without issue. I still maintain my blu-ray backups, just in case.

[Casuall]

(02-16-2011 09:29 PM)buba013 Wrote:  Good luck with the build.

ZFS is better in 8.** with a revamped gui just working out some bugs but its now programed by i different group they still release it but also use it in production systems...

Thanks for the imput. Tell me more about your set-up. Are you re-using an old PC like mine or a fresh build with one of the newer Motherboards and Atom processors? Which LAN speed are you running?

[buba013]

i have used it all , old hardware new, hardware raid cards ,

both atom 510 and 525 all work OK only issue i found with the older hardware and onboard sata is speeds .

all works well , never had any issues i run a mix of raid 0 raid 5 and zfs all works fine for home use.

but what i did forget to add was if you want to add 1 disk at a time go look at unraid.

but i am a fan of raid cards, first thing you need to look at is is the hardware supported which you may find 1 or 2 components are not , some issues with soft/fake raid cards (software based raid card not hardware base ( so a chip and memory on board of the card)

but really build it put it together and see which setup gives you the best performance.

i see about 35 to 60 MB xfer read speeds depends which box .
amd and intel

they all 2 gb ram
cpu E2200
old amd 939 cpu
E5400
510u


525 use to run freenas now running 2008 r2 with sas card

i use mix of rocket raid cards
and
adaptec

but onboard will be fine until you out grow that setup and build a bigger 1




really looking forward to openmediavualt

only issue i found with the older hardware was lack of performance but should be fine to start with.

But pm with some questions if any at work right now

in regards to the drive size if you initialize the drive so get it aliened properly you will not have an issue , also if using the green wd drives Google jumper 5 and 6 ,

no big issues with 1.5 + sized drives i see 70 to 115 MB read/write depends what i am copying

[Casuall]

I bought four additional 1TB hard drives for $200 at Microcenter. So, now I have a total of six Hitachi Deskstar 7200rpm and the 320 Western Digital that came with the old eMachine. Now of course there is not enough power leads for all those hard drive so I bought some adapters. The NZXT CB 44SATA-W Singled Sleeved 4-Pin Molex to 4 SATA Premium Connector Cable, and one with 3 SATA connectors from Amazon for $7.99 and $6.99 each. I also picked up a BYTECC PCI SATA controller Raid controller card (Microcenter $12.00) with 2 SATA ports and 1 PATA slot. I also need to convert a couple of 5.25 bays to 3.5 for the additional hard drives. The StarTech.com METAL 5.25 TO 3.5IN Drive adapter bracket (Amazon 2 @ $7.11 each) which should arrive in the mail today will do the job for me. When installing all these hard drive I thought it would be a good idea to keep the drives running as cool as possible. So I have a bought an Ultra Silent 120MM Dual Ball Bearing Fan for the front of the case (Amazon $14.99). This case did not list it even had a mount for the 120mm fan but after pulling the front bezel off I could see it had pre-made space for it. I also have a 80mm exhaust fan in the rear which I may upgrade to something larger. Now the hard drives run at about 28 to 32 degrees.

I decided to run RAID 5 instead of RAID 1 because with RAID 5 I could get 4TB of usable space with the six hard drive versus 3TB with the RAID 1 set-up. I am still experimenting with the FreeNAS so I only have a few movies stored on there so far.

____________________
HP Pavilion Elite m9357c - AMD Phenom 9550 Quad Core 2.2GHz, 6GB DDR2, 750GB SATA 3G, 2-DVD-RW DL Lightscribe, 15-in-1 Media Reader, TV Tuner, Windows 7 Premium 64-bit -> 2 Western Digital MyBook Essential 1TB USB 2.0 External HD -> Netgear WNR854T Wireless N Router - 300Mbps, 802.11n, 10/100/1000 Mbps 4-Ports -> (2) Popcorn Hour-A110 with Western Digital 320GB HD -> My Lil Movie Jukebox revision 6 -> Sylvania LC320SLX 32-inch HDTV

[nuke12]

Have you had any issues with driver support for your hardware?

When I was trying out FreeNAS, some of comments I found was to be very careful what hardware you pick. So in my case, I picked a motherboard and SATA controller cards that were on the FreeNAS/FreeBSD as supported list.

Just wondering what your doing in this area?

[Casuall]

(03-04-2011 02:21 PM)nuke12 Wrote:  Have you had any issues with driver support for your hardware?

When I was trying out FreeNAS, some of comments I found was to be very careful what hardware you pick. So in my case, I picked a motherboard and SATA controller cards that were on the FreeNAS/FreeBSD as supported list.

Just wondering what your doing in this area?

Actually everything has worked just fine so far. Now I expected to have some issues with the Byteec RAID Controller but it was recognized and everything went along smoothly. I did purchase a Adaptec SATA 6-Port Raid Controller Card this is listed as supported hardware just in-case the other did not work and to add more hard drives at a later date (eBay $21.00).

____________________
HP Pavilion Elite m9357c - AMD Phenom 9550 Quad Core 2.2GHz, 6GB DDR2, 750GB SATA 3G, 2-DVD-RW DL Lightscribe, 15-in-1 Media Reader, TV Tuner, Windows 7 Premium 64-bit -> 2 Western Digital MyBook Essential 1TB USB 2.0 External HD -> Netgear WNR854T Wireless N Router - 300Mbps, 802.11n, 10/100/1000 Mbps 4-Ports -> (2) Popcorn Hour-A110 with Western Digital 320GB HD -> My Lil Movie Jukebox revision 6 -> Sylvania LC320SLX 32-inch HDTV

[Casuall]

Okay it's been awhile since my last post so I need to update how my project has been working out. The adaptec SATA 6-Port Raid Controller Card works but only for smaller hard drives which defeats the purpose so it of no use for me now. The BYTECC PCI SATA controller Raid controller card works but I still needed more SATA slots. So I bought a Syba SD-SATA-4P Serial ATA150 4x Ports RAID Controller Card with SIL3114 Chipset (Amazon $23.00) and it works pretty good. So I got 7 1TB hard drives install and the original hard drive that came with the eMachine still running Windows XP. Yes, it can still boot up in windows if I want. Everything work good for awhile and than for some reason one one of the drives kept rebuilding itself. It did this several times so I knew I was having some type of problem with the system. My first thought was that the hard drive was failing so I just bought another one and replaced the troubled one. You can guess what happened and of course rebuilding again and again and again you get the picture. So next I think it is probably the RAID Controller card. But, first I wanted to try the SATA cables which I had extra laying around. After replacing the SATA cable it rebuilt itself again and was stable. I had another problem that for some reason I could not see all the files stored on the drives. Fortunately for me I had saved my "Configuration" set-up and restored it from the back-up and everything was back to normal.

Now my FreeNAS works with all my PC's, iMac, Popcorn Hour, and Uebo. I well tell yall about my adventures with the Uebo the next time I post. Also did a rebuild of the HP Pavillion Elite. If you have any questions just give me a shout right here.

____________________ UPDATES ARE IN RED
HP Pavilion Elite m9357c - AMD Phenom 9550 Quad Core 2.2GHz, 6GB DDR2, 750GB SATA 3G, 2-DVD-RW DL Lightscribe, 15-in-1 Media Reader, TV Tuner, Windows 7 Premium 64-bit -> 2 Western Digital MyBook Essential 1TB USB 2.0 External HD ->(1) Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive -> Netgear WNR854T Wireless N Router - 300Mbps, 802.11n, 10/100/1000 Mbps 4-Ports -> (1) Popcorn Hour-A110 with Western Digital 320GB HD ->(1) Uebo with Western Digital 250GB Hard Drive-> My Lil Movie Jukebox revision 6 -> Sylvania LC320SLX 32-inch HDTV -> Mitsubishi WD65C9 65" C9 Series DLP Rear Projection HDTV