So after following the CIFS setup and examples in the FreeNAS online documentation I could not connect to the share in Windows 8. I must have setup permissions about 10 times before I decided to restart the CIFS service and that did the trick. So as a quick reminder, after you setup your CIFS share(s) go into Services → Control Services and turn CIFS off, wait a minute a two and turn it back on.
As a side note File History setup in Windows 8 works well with a FreeNAS CIFS share.
Upgrading FreeNAS from 8.3.1 and newer using the GUI upgrade method has worked for me twice so far without any issues. Here’s how to do it.
The update procedure has another window with a progress bar of sorts that at least lets you know it’s doing something. You need to be patient here, it took a good couple of minutes to see anything. If you’re worried you can see activity on your NAS if you have a display hooked up to it. When the procedure is done it will reboot the NAS and you’re done.
So I embarked on the journey of building a NAS for my home lab. The purpose of this storage solution was to run VM’s and store backups from a few PC’s in my home. The build consisted of the following:
I decided to use FreeNAS 9.1.0 on this build. The FreeNAS interface is pretty good and there is a strong community behind it. FreeNAS can be ran from a USB drive which is how my NAS is currently ran. The 3 2TB HDD’s make up the main storage pool using ZFS in a RAIDZ array. A RAIDZ array is similar to RAID5. The Intel 313 20GB SSD is used for the ZIL, otherwise know as the ZFS Intent Log which when put on a separate device is known as the SLOG or separate intent log. The ZIL is primarily write intensive so its important to have a device that accommodates a lot of writes and is fast enough to receive those writes. The second SSD is used for L2ARC which is a read cache between the RAM (ARC) and your storage pool. There’s quite a bit of knowledge out there about these and I implore you to read up about them and decide if its right for you.
When this build is up and running it uses about 50-60 watts which met my needs for a decent storage location that didn’t use a lot of power. The Intel Celeron G1610 helped a lot with this. This Celeron G1610 was released this year and is based on the Ivy Bridge architecture. It was using this or an Atom processor and I chose the Celeron so it would give the NAS some uumph. The performance of this processor compared to the value of its price is awesome.
My first mistake with this build was only using 4GB of ram. ZFS will disable pre-fetching unless you have more than 4GB. Use more than 4GB! My second mistake was only have 1 on-board NIC. The dual port card was an extra purchase and helped when using it with ESXi and multiple datastores. If you are just using your NAS for basic storage you may be able to get away with just 1 NIC.
Now I have to vent about the power supply. I’ll be on my 3rd Corsair CX430 power supply in about 2 weeks. I have to applaud Corsair for their easy warranty returns but having 2 of these go bad just sucks. If this 3rd one goes bad I’ll probably return it for another brand or perhaps take a closer look at the other parts in my build to make sure nothing else could be causing the issue.
