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Archive 2015 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?

  
 
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?


Has anyone ever used this setup before? For reference, I'm using Lightroom 4, which is rather dated, but I presume the latest version isn't too much different, and using a typical wired gigabit ethernet setup. Most of my photos are a little over 20MP, taken with a Canon 5D2 or 5D3.

For the longest time, I've stored my raw photo files on a (commercial) NAS which is mapped to a network drive, in lieu of storing them on a local hard disk. In the past, when I click on a new photo that I haven't clicked on during this lightroom session, it's taken between three to five seconds to display it at full resolution when the view is zoomed in at 1:1.

A few days ago, I built up a FreeNAS box from an 5-year-old desktop that was recently retired, this is more than capable of saturating the gigabit ethernet. And yesterday I finished copying all my raw photo files onto this. I removed the old network drive (served by the commercial NAS) and switched it over to the FreeNAS box, now when I click on a new photo in lightroom, it takes a very consistent 2 seconds before it is displayed at full resolution (view still set to 1:1 or 100%).

Has anyone used a FreeNAS setup like this over the long term and had any problems with it? I plan on keeping the commercial NAS maintained and running, if anything I can always switch over to it as a backup. So far the FreeNAS box has only been running a few days, it seems reliable but it's hard to say how reliable the FreeNAS software is going to be over the long term.

Which is my question, has anyone used this type of NAS over the long term? The reason I went with FreeNAS is b'cos people I've talked to irl swore the performance was great, better than anything commercial at the price, and it's done a good job at that (IMO). But I wanted to ask how reliable the software it has been over the long term, for anyone who has used it? Any bugs, showstoppers, or the like that I should know about? The only downside that I've found so far is the FreeNAS box is an absolute power hog, consuming around 110W when not in use and 160W when in use, but I can live with that.



Jul 23, 2015 at 08:58 AM
nma
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?


For me, the most important issue is archival storage. Is that a goal of your work? Does the FreeNas provide archival storage? If not what is the plan? In my experience NAS has many failure modes and some of them can require a lot of effort and time to recover. In the worst case, there is no recovery. When I have used NAS with proprietary hardware and software, it was always a problem.


Jul 23, 2015 at 02:06 PM
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?


Archival storage is a concern, but not really a function of the NAS. Basically I'm looking for convenience, some degree of performance (can it saturate a gigabit ethernet link) and reliability.


Jul 23, 2015 at 07:09 PM
15Bit
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?


FreeNAS should be as solid as FreeBSD, on which it is based. Which is to say, it should be very reliable as long as you have fully compatible hardware. This is the only real issue with FreeNAS - making sure your hardware is properly support.

For archival, or at least more reliable, file storage, be sure to have your drives set up with ZFS for file system and disk management.

It shouldn't be using that much power operating as just a NAS, so have a look with the CPU monitoring tools and find out what is going on.



Jul 24, 2015 at 03:18 AM
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?


15Bit wrote:
For archival, or at least more reliable, file storage, be sure to have your drives set up with ZFS for file system and disk management.

It shouldn't be using that much power operating as just a NAS, so have a look with the CPU monitoring tools and find out what is going on.

Actually the power thing, I don't know if there's any way around it. B'cos this is an old re-purposed AMD Phenom II PC from roughly 5 years ago, not really designed to be power efficient in the first place. Motherboard and CPU draws a lot of power (even when doing very little) compared to the embedded ARM setups used in most commercial NAS out there.

It is set up as RAIDZ1 (4 drives) right now and that seems to be working fine, not impacting performance as far as being able to saturate the gigabit ethernet.



Jul 24, 2015 at 10:05 AM
15Bit
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?


It might be that FreeBSD doesn't fully support the low power states on the older Phenom. Still, it seems to be pulling more power than i would expect.

Check the CPU usage anyway, as ZFS is quite CPU intensive and it might have some sort of rogue ZFS process running. I have had that happen with my Linux / ZFS file server. I've also seen from time to time that the network transfer rates slow down for no obvious reason, so that i only get 50MB/sec rather than full network bandwidth. This might just be the Linux implementation of ZFS though.

How much RAM is in the box?



Jul 24, 2015 at 10:21 AM
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?


15Bit wrote:
How much RAM is in the box?

8GB which was the minimum required to run FreeNAS 9.3 I believe.



Jul 24, 2015 at 11:10 AM
15Bit
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?


That should be OK then. ZFS can suffer significantly if you have too little RAM. Good to see the FreeNAS maintainers are listing sensible system requirements.


Jul 24, 2015 at 12:49 PM
aubsxc
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?


I switched to FreeNAS from Windows Home Server (the old version) several years ago and have not looked back. It does everything I need it to do, and with the right hardware, it offers protection against silent data corruption via the built in ZFS file system. My primary home server is built with server grade hardware (Xeon 1230 quad core CPU, Supermicro Socket 1155 server board and 16GB ECC memory), and I currently have 2 RAIDZ2 pools running with about 48TB of formatted storage. The system serves primarily to backup our home computers and to serve data for our HTPC (music and Blu-ray rips). FreeNAS is running on bare metal currently (only the FreeNAS data server served by the machine). I have thought about virtualizing FreeNAS through ESXi, but I don't have an immediate need so I have not bothered yet. Probably a future project.


Jul 26, 2015 at 05:14 PM
15Bit
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?


That's a pretty high spec setup for a home machine. I shan't ask what you use 48TB of storage for

I currently host my 2 RAIDZ-1 pools (~12TB formatted) on an old Q6600 with 8GB RAM. It does media serving, network file serving, hosts a virtual machine, and acts as a PC for junior to play flash games in a web browser. It used to run as the home firewall too, but i use the router for that now (i do sometimes wonder about changing back, given the regular reporting of vulnerabilities in home routers). It runs Linux though, as FreeBSD support for all the functions it performs is not as good. I did look at changing it to a Xeon to get the ECC RAM, but the cost was not really justifiable.



Jul 27, 2015 at 03:02 AM
aubsxc
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?


15Bit wrote:
That's a pretty high spec setup for a home machine. I shan't ask what you use 48TB of storage for


I am using about 30TB on the server right now, and a lot of that is blu-ray movies and lossless music ripped from my personal collection of movies and CDs. I usually play my music through my Oppo 105D and it reads all the files from the server share. Movies are played through a small HTPC which also reads files from the server directly. There is also stuff related to my work and my photographs. Over the last 10 years I have been scanning and archiving my old chromes and negatives in addition to the digital images I have been capturing, and that stuff adds up as well. My plan is to replace the 16x 4TB drives currently in the server with 8TB drives in a year or two when prices have dropped a bit, and eventually get the server up to about 100TB formatted capacity.



Jul 27, 2015 at 01:47 PM
15Bit
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?


That's a small fortune in hard drives. What case are you using for this monster? And indeed, what hard disk interface cards?

For movies i find the HTPC redundant since moving to Plex and a Samsung smart TV with a native Plex client.



Jul 27, 2015 at 02:23 PM
aubsxc
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?


Case is the Norco 4224 that holds a maximum of 24 drives and provides a SAS to SAS connection from the HBA cards via SFF 8087 cables (fewer cables to deal with since no individual SATA cables):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219038

For the HBA I am using a pair of IBM M1015 (LSI 9220 8i) set to IT mode where the drives are passed through to the OS:

http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-m1015-part-1-started-lsi-92208i/

Picked up the HBA cards on some computer forums for about $160 shipped (both) including the cables.

I still have room to add another 8 drives if I wanted, and all 6 SATA ports on the mobo are free (all drives are hooked up to the HBAs).

And did I mention, I have a second server with fairly similar hardware specs that backs up the primary server? And a small 4-drive SFF NAS box that holds all the important data (no movie/music) and lives in my friends house and gets updated every 4 to 6 weeks? It is a little bit overkill



Jul 27, 2015 at 05:42 PM
15Bit
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · FreeNAS (9.3) with Lightroom? Any problems over the long term?


aubsxc wrote:
It is a little bit overkill


Yes, i think we can all agree with that

And i thought i spent too much money on computer stuff...



Jul 28, 2015 at 02:13 AM





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