Mixed drives of similar size worked
In my last post I mentioned the concern that I might not be able to mix drive types. The NAS is currently running 2 x 3TB Seagate Constellation drives, 1 x 3TB Seagate Barracuda drive, and 1 x 3TB Western Digital Red Drive. So far, so good. I realize I’m taking a risk here, especially with the Barracuda drive, which really isn’t made for this kind of assignment (RAID – in this case RAID Z1).
This is, of course, a temporary backup until I get another 8TB hard drive. But what this means is that I might be able to mix a couple of other 8TB drives with my existing Seagate drives. It might be possible to do RAID Z2 (with 2 redundant drives) for the same price as 1 new 8TB drive if I’m willing to take the risk on used drives.
TrueNAS is up and running
I’ve been now running TrueNAS for a little over 10 hours. Our entire movie collection is copied over. And our collection of television shows are in the process of copying over. Initially, I wasn’t sure how I was going to transfer data:
- Mount an NFS share and copy data?
- Mount a SAMBA share and copy data?
- SSH/SFTP?
There are a few videos on setting up TrueNAS where the presenters seemed to have skipped steps when it comes to setting up SAMBA (they’re starting having previously created users). With our media center my method has always been to use SSH/SFTP. I found that was easily possible too with TrueNAS.
Once the television shows have finished copying over I’ll have a better sense of whether the RAID Z1 is going to hold up. I plan to shut down the TrueNAS server once files are all copied over. It’s going to live in a corner unplugged until I can get another 8TB drive or two.
Possible future upgrades
While transferring data I noticed the Pentium G620 CPU in the Dell PowerEdge T110 II was being pegged pretty hard, between 85-97% usage, with most of that at the lower end. While doing a bit of research I found that the T110 II could take a XEON E5-1260L CPU. The E5-1260L is a quad core, 2.4GHz server CPU that runs at 45 watts.
I also thought about upgrading to 32GB of RAM (4 x 8GB DDR 1333MHz ECC RAM can be obtained on AliExpress for almost the same price as the CPU). I’m just not sure of the PowerEdge would be compatible with the ECC Registered RAM I was looking at (Killsire). Neither of these seems necessary, but I was thinking more long-term.
Transferring issues, and solutions
As a lazy admin I use Filezilla for SFTP file transfers. Filezilla is a nice, graphical ftp/sftp file transfer application that lets you store all your ftp/sftp sites/configurations. But it seems to have an issue when first started up/transferring.
When you initially transfer using Filezilla, it defaults to transferring 2 files at a time. I noticed that each transfer was running between 9-19 MB/s. This might have been fine if I was transferring 5 files at once, but the speed was slow for transferring only 2 files at once. I bumped the allowed number of transfers at once down to 1 and the transfer speed shot up to 109 MB/s (with speeds pushing over 115 MB/s in areas). I left the number of transfers at 1 as this seemed to make the most sense to get data over as fast as possible.
TrueNAS Applications
I noticed TrueNAS has a bunch of applications that can be installed, applications like Plex, Jellyfin, Sync Thing, Nextcloud, etc. Because this isn’t a permanent NAS I installed one application, ClamAV. I was thinking it might be neat to install something like Elastic Search, but I remember that application can be very demanding.
I didn’t see KODI in the list of applications, but this makes sense as it’s less of a webapp type application. But this made me think that rather than having our media center as a large machine in the middle of the living room, it could be something like a Tiny Form Factor PC running KODI + a TrueNAS box with several drives. Whether to keep the T110 II, or build something custom is the real question.
I’m not sure our current media center, with it’s Corsair Spec 01 case is going to be able to handle 4 drives plus an SSD, and our ripping machine is too unreliable (with it’s Atermiter X79 board) to be a NAS. The upgraded T110 II seems a very real possibility.
So far, this experiment seems to be a success. Whether the janky NAS holds the data until I can transfer it to a larger NAS setup, only time will tell.