USR8700 NAS

[pete_c]

Mine's been running pretty well now for about 2-3 years or so 24/7 except for this morning. I have mine set up in a Raid 5 array. Currently showing one of three drives is rebuilding itself (green) and two Raid5 drives (red). The directories are not accessible at this time but showing that the data is intact. My assumption is that the rebuilding drive is failing and I am looking to do a hot swap. (going to add two drives instead for a Raid5 with a spare). As an experiement removing the "green" drive and installed a new one. It just showed new but didn't request to have it put into the Raid5 setup.

The drive rebuilt itself into the array. I see the shares and notice that they are still occupying space but I can't access them. I shut off the box and checked each drive to be physically OK. I believe the OS took a dump in that I can't enable FTP or SSH on the device. I have written to USR hoping that there is a way to "reset" the OS but still giving me access to current configuration.

Anyone have experience with the US Robotics 8700?

 

[pete_c]

The USR8700 was rebuilt but decided to downsize the drives in it.

I then decided to build a FREENAS box with a spare PC.

I am very impressed with its speed on the network and light web interface.

 

[electron]

FreeNAS is nice (I do run one as well, it used to use the m0n0wall interface which works well), but I actually prefer OpenFiler, seems to be more mature and supports more advanced stuff.

 

[pete_c]

Checked out Openfiler and UnRaid. NoRaid looks interesting too. Currently using softeraid and I like the status that FreeNAS gives me via their GUI. I currently have Smoothwall installed on a couple of other boxes.

 

[beelzerob]

So, what's the idiot's guide to the merits/differences between NoRaid, FreeNAS, and Openfiler?

 

[pete_c]

So far what I am seeing - HW base is 2.4 Ghz / 1 Mb PC in a tower with a 4 drive hot swappable SATA cage, onboard 2 drive SATA controller and PCI 4 drive SATA controller. 4 1 TB drives in the cage and 3 smaller individual SATA drives.

FREENAS - current version is ok but poorly supported. Its based in free BSD. I get some strange HW and SW errors with it both based in the "nightly version". I get network errors in the logs with some major large transfers. I make a couple of tweaks to the "smb.conf" file and I don't see the network errors but the box intermittently loses its network connectivity. I installed a second NIC to test.

OPENFILER - looked at it in London a couple of years ago. Seems that the IT folks that I worked with there advocated its use. Its based in Linux and HW Raid.

UNRAID - bootable via USB stick. Looks promising. As I am still playing was going to give it a try.

 

[pete_c]

Still playing with FreeNAS.

I have an antiquated network still (100Mbs) and was looking to push it some looking at speed graphs of transfers. I originally was using a cheap 4 Port SATA card ($15 special) and noticed that I had to jumper the drives to 150 instead of using them at 300. I was not totally impressed with the performance. What I have learned though is being able to take drives out of the software RAID array (about 50% full) and bring them back up without losing data. I ended up purchasing a $70 SATA Raid card and that improved my performance to utilizing all of the bandwidth now at close to 95%speed.

Having a 4-drive SATA drive cage helps. In my testing I've also added 2 more SATA drives and 2 IDE drives making the total 8 drives with 2 pairs set up in a software RAID-1 setup. I've also added a second NIC card in the box.

I am using Smoothwall (Polar) on another box for a FW. Using it for a few years now initially running it on an old 386 PC. Never break it and its always running. Tested it on a CF card boot net appliance and it works well for secondary internet connection. Its GUI is very intuitive. Back in the 90's switched over from HW FW's to initially MS Windows then later on to Linux first being IP Cop (FW on a floppy).