 So we're getting ready here to do a free NAS build. I have here six Western Digital Red NAS drives, the six terabyte variety, six of those. I have 32 gigs of RAM, gigabyte motherboard and an AMD FX processor and an EVGA power supply. Now all this is going into a custom free NAS build for a client that has some large storage needs and we're gonna kind of walk you through the process. Now, some of you are already gonna start the debate and you can find plenty of articles on this. I go, but Tom, I think that's not ECC memory. You are correct, it is not ECC memory. I have been using non-ECC for a long time. There is plenty of information, including from the guys from the free NAS project and from other people in the industry that you do not have to use ECC memory. Also, this is gonna be running free NAS which is based on ZFS VBSD. So we'll be covering some of that, how we configure it, how we set it up and how we integrate it into their network. And so I'm gonna give you the whole build process here and then some of the software setup process, kind of walk you through building a nice, large rate array to store all your stuff because we're producing data at just an amazing amount now and if you don't have it stored somewhere redundantly, you know, even if it's just on a local server, you do not have a proper backup and the problem is just storing in the cloud can be rather difficult. So even for this client, this server, once it's built, we're taking their older array server which is gonna be a ready gear, and the ready gear, the net gear NAS box and we're gonna be upgrading that because we're gonna have the files copying back and forth between them so they have two copies of all the data on site and then their third backup is going to be offsite. Now the problem with that is it's downtime. So in worst case scenario, if one of these servers goes down, we're gonna be able to pull it back up. Ideally this is gonna be their primary server, we'll have a local copy of the backup. In the event that both go down, we have a cloud backup, the downside of that is pulling that much data takes a little while so it'll either be mailing back a hard drive but everything's just creating layers of redundancy and that's kinda what this project is about in terms of for the client, in terms of for you guys, this is about building and everything for a free NAS box. So if you wanna build one at home, you wanna build one for your company, this'll get you started and kinda get you the idea of how to work with free NAS. So let's get started. So the box has been built. It's assembled, it's tested, and it works really well. So we went with a RAID Z2 with all these six terabyte hard drives. We went with the, as I showed at the beginning, the Western Digital Red NAS drives. They're really low wattage and letting this thing run for 24 hours and dumping over a terabyte of half a data, deleting it and putting it back on there a couple times to really make sure there wasn't any problems. It didn't have any issues. This worked really well. The drives really never got above about 34, 35 at their hottest under full load. Now that's important. Now these docks right here, and that's why I got this here from Kingwin, this dock system is really cool. It's compatible with SAS and CEDA and these are just a pretty slick system. So it almost tries you in Nintendo cartridge when you pull these in and out and I'll show you that in a second here. We went with the Gigabyte motherboard and this is one of their ultra durable motherboards. Now this system is really for storage for our client. It's about having readily available archival videos that they have. They do civil engineering work. So they have lots of things they need to access, lots of little files, pictures when they had things taken apart like sewer systems or other picture large scale city projects. So all that documentation, if there's an emergency they need to be able to get to it pretty easily and they wanted to have something like online all the time they can't archive it and try to pull it off somewhere else. And that's where this system comes in. So all six drives, you know as I said 36 terabytes worth of drives when you put that in a RAID Z2 configuration you come down to about 22 terabytes of usable drive space on FreeNAS. And the reason it was Z2 is you have an issue with RAID where okay I have at least one redundant drive. It doesn't seem statistically like you two drives that fail except this is the part you have to think about. If one drive fails you have to rebuild it off of the data on the other drives. The stress of the rebuild could cause another drive to fail and then the whole RAID RAID collapses at that point. RAID Z2 it requires two drives to fail before the RAID RAID collapses. So while one's being rebuilt if another one were to fail there's enough data put there. Now you can go even further with RAID Z3 and reduces the amount of usable but we didn't need to go all the way there. RAID Z2, two drive failures and we're good. You know, we can survive that on here. Now the processor we want is the AMD FX8320E. That's the low wattage model because it just doesn't need a lot of horsepower. Now we did go with 32 gigs of RAM and the reason for that is with the RAM you want enough RAM. Roughly you have a gigabyte of RAM for each terabyte of hard drive space and that it's a rough rule of thumb you can get away with it being a little bit lower but what it creates is it loads all the tables in FreeNAS. The entirety of the drive and has it more accessible. So it's not just like caching but it's more of, hey here's an index of where all the things are and you start talking about 50, 60,000 files on the drive you want good fast access to that and FreeNAS can facilitate that. So it will suck up as much RAM as needed. When you first turn it on there's really nothing going on you'll see the RAM usage is low. As soon as you start copying files to it or from it it starts rising right up and it'll just eat up all the memory available to it. The FreeNAS uses ZFS. ZFS is a COW copy on write file system or COW as they call it. That is really, really fault tolerant and the way ZFS is designed it's just an amazing system. You can, matter of fact I'm gonna plug Michael Lucas I've met the guy I've been to his talks he wrote the book matter of fact two books on how ZFS works a great in depth you can learn about the resilient nature of the ZFS file system and I've even talked to engineers that worked at Ubuntu and they're like they like it some of their backend stuff does run on it because you can literally just shut it off. Like they don't have to worry about it right committing they can actually pull them out and just say, you know, boom and it's amazing it recovers perfectly fine. The we've had power failures at other places in our own ZFS and it's never once had it have a problem and we've replaced drives and rebuilt the RAID arrays in them. It's just can't say enough good things about it and that's really what matters is having a really good reliability on this. Now it's also with FreeNAS if you wanted to build something high performance and maybe sometime I'll get around the building one like this, you can set SSDs in front of these because these are only 5400 RPM drives you can put and you highly recommend putting these in a RAID array you can put basically caching drives in front of the other drives so that gives it a high speed spot to write and you can actually build a separate array of them and those ones you would have that would write back there. Now the risk of course would be if in the power failure and your cache drives haven't flushed out that's also why you would want them to be RAID but those are real specific high end configurations. For this one like I said we just went with those in the storage. Now the other thing we did and I'm gonna show you in the back here is we went with dual USB so these USB thumb drives when you install them you're running through the install you select both of the thumb drives for the install and then automatically goes okay you must want these in a mirror and it mirrors them for you so I can remove either one of them and it will still boot. Now if one of them fails, same thing it still boots up. Now I always recommend back up and download the configuration file which Freedance is really easy to set back up so if we ever had a problem we could just replace the board it doesn't care it's not particular about hardware like Windows is you can take the drives out as long as you have all the drives or at least enough of them you can rebuild the pool in another Freedance machine and it'll bring them all back in but also not having to worry about the thumb drives if one goes bad, alert comes up it says hey I can't find one of them and we've tested this it boots with either one individually but then it tells you that there's a re-syncing issue but then you plug them both back in and it re-syncs them in a way you go so it works really well for having that for redundancy and they're so inexpensive I mean these things are 10 bucks a piece so for 10 extra dollars you can have redundant mirrored RAID 1 thumb drives in there so let's get into the dock and kind of show you how that works too now they have this tiny little key and I know it's really small and it allows you to lock the drives so you can keep people from pulling it out but it's just mostly to keep you from accidentally ejecting the drive it doesn't really provide a lot of security in there so it's twist, you know, turn this way I bet you could probably put a pair of pliers and just, you know, put it in there's nothing real special about it so that comes there now the drives themselves slide out and it's really slick now you have, when you set them here you feel like I should be able to push it in but you don't have to you slowly close the dock and they snap in now I also feel like if there's a problem with the drive you can blow on it like a Nintendo cartridge because that's what it feels like to me when it goes in and out it's like, hey look, a Nintendo cartridge but this dock is nice I mean this is completely tool-less really it's tool-less I can take the drives in and out I can just slide the drive out here I can open a box for another one and yeah, you open a box and away you go now the way we lumber the drives to keep it simple there's six data ports and they refer to as 88-0 through 88-5 so we just started at zero at the top put the five at the bottom and we know which one so Freenast identifies a drive as bad we know exactly which one it is and we can find it in the dock now these docks are hot-swappable as well and you can do that without restarting the machine now another neat thing about the way Freenast works is this doesn't matter we can take the drives and we're gonna do a little rearrangement here shuffle them and Freenast just goes, okay they're all part of the same array so it doesn't have any issues it's not even even an error when it comes up with this it finds all the partitions it has the configuration file so swapping the drives, no big deal and if you gotta swap one out as long as it's the same equivalent size you can add it right back in the pool it rebuilds now only time you're gonna have a problem with that if you go with a drive smaller you're not gonna rebuild and I highly recommend going with all the same drives now in our consideration with Freenast when you're ordering these drives don't order them from all the same vendor at the same time the problem you run into is let's say there was a bad batch of drives and the vendors large scale you know New Age, Amazon wherever you're getting them from Micro Center they order batches at a time so if you have an entire large batch of drives and they were all bad that vendor may have an entire pile of them all bad but when you order from different vendors and different pools you'll find that the drives take they're different slightly different build dates so statistically and this is just a guessing game of course statistically less likely to fail so maybe on a certain day they had a bad run but that run went to one company and another run that was good went to another company from a different day and by mixing them up from different vendors unfortunately you always get the best price but with all that price matching we will get a good deal and now we have a variety of manufacturer dates speaking of which something we found interesting when looking at the drives even with different vendors most of these drives were let's see 2016, November and I think some of them were in October so these kind of sit around for a little while because this is June and like we literally I mean they just came in the other day so this is June 2017 so these drives have been sitting around for four or five months so we've been noticing that in some of the drives we think just some of the larger ones like the six terabyte they take a little while before they you know ship them out so that was kind of it for the build I can go in briefie cover to software and just kind of show you how you can figure the rate in there it's pretty straightforward I've done I think some videos on this before but I'll give you the rundown of it real quick and show you how you set up the array for RAID Z2 it's really easy alright so I'm in virtual box and the reason for that is to show you the install and do a clean, clear screen capture we're going to just run through the installer process here it's exactly the same on the desktop the only thing different we did on the desktop was we copied it to a USB drive to install it to the dual USB drives we could just as easily rip the ISO into a CD and boot it off a CD and do it either way it works virtual box doesn't support USB bootables so we just took the ISO and attached the ISO to one of the controllers and these are my FreeNAS Boot1 Boot2 and we're going to show you how to set up a RAID during install I like to make my installs really clean and capturing it this way looks way better than a camera or my shoulder and you're trying to read what's on the screen but once I go through the install then we'll jump over to the physical actual build and I'll walk you through how to set up the RAID array inside of there because that's all done through the web interface so let's get started now you never really want to install FreeNAS other than for testing purposes inside of a virtual machine like this it really wants direct access to the hardware just a little side note there for people wondering if, hey, should I run this in a virtualized environment not the most ideal you want FreeNAS to have bold direct access now this is actually nice because you can install or upgrade reboot system shutdown this is your standard menu installer but this is also for recovering a FreeNAS never had to do it I've never had one crash so bad that I couldn't just do this but, you know, select one or more drives where FreeNAS should be installed use the arrow keys now this is what I was talking about to select RAID there's no real configuration you need to do if you select two devices those devices become the rated devices as simple as that now they're all labeled in here ADA0 and ADA1 I believe in FreeNAS they're DA0 and DA1 which that is referring to the USBs in this case because they're all connected to the PCI bus now you can install FreeNAS to a hard drive but why would you? that's kind of a waste of hard drive you could use an older hard drive because you have it but then that's not as reliable go spend a few dollars on the USB and get two of them because, well, we've got these on sale for $6 each it just makes a lot more sense this will cause all ADA to be erased it's just letting you know yep we get to set a password I love when companies don't have default passwords on things when on installs because, well, people go I'll just leave it at default and no, that's a problem and then someone hacks you later because you left everything at default you have to use a password you can boot via UFI or BIOS depending on the motherboard setup I'm going to do BIOS I don't think VirtualBox says UFI very well not real sure on that never really tried now it's going to run through the installer and I'll fast forward through all this and that's it, completed installs relatively fast we're going to shut down so we can remove the CD and then you reboot FreeNAS just going to do normal boot up and I feel like waiting for the seconds to count down and now that's it so from here you can configure the network interfaces if you need to set it as static and things like that setup default routes VLAN interface link aggregation you can start getting into all the features here or do a reset the root password because somehow you forgot what she set it to and or just go right to the HTTP the address and get started with FreeNAS so it's kind of a nice thing is it tells you what IP address it got so you don't got to go digging for it but pretty much after this if you remember the password you set you can simply go to the IP address log in as a route in the password you set and get started with FreeNAS and that's where we're going to start now is we're actually go into the production machine and show you how we have it configured now before we switch over to the production machine now that we've run through the install I'm going to show you what it looks like to run the wizard now I don't usually run it but if you're just getting started it's a quick way to get a couple shares enabled in FreeNAS so we'll go ahead and set it to Detroit next now call pull name, we'll call it TestTank now automatic pick reasonable defaults good reliability under virtualization backups media RAID Z1 or logs RAID 0 which means just put all of them together now the wizard does a pretty good job I believe automatically it will probably pick a standard RAID Z2 for this one or a RAID Z1 for medium reliability and more storage now this is all about how many drives out of the pool can fail before there's a problem so we'll go ahead and just hit next and yes and just show you what the wizard does we're skipping active directory for this we'll call share name is our share test we're going to hit allow guest ownership if I added users we'll see they can have all the permissions and add next council messages I do like this on this is a show them in the footer down here so we'll go ahead and we're not gonna set up email right now confirm and with that it created the TestTank the share test and it's already turned on things like the if you go to services it already turned on SMB it also creates a window share with the same name all right so we're on the production machine it's all set up and configured so the first thing we want to do is switch it to HTTPS I don't care if it's your own internal network you feel it's a trusted network you I really recommend encrypting everything just have it I'll be in the habit of doing it it's a good security habit we're over here to a CA we have to create an internal CA so it's gonna give us you know the error but no big deal there we'll run through it real quick all right so now we have an internal CA now we can go create a certificate create internal search all right now we have our own internal certificate I'm gonna go back over here HTTPS and choose internal search hit save all right so now we have our you know course error because it's an internally sound certificate but you know like I said security that's important so having a certain error keeps it from passing everything through clear text so let's go to the boot and this is what I was talking about how you can see the default install reboot boot volume condition healthy now this is where you'll get an error if you have a problem like say when I show there was two thumb drives in this I keeps the status on there and it'll do a little alert and tell you the status of these go to advanced the things I like to turn on is you can turn off actually by default it's on this council menu like so if you didn't want anyone to walk up to the machine generally when we're putting these machines in there's no keyboard or mouse attached to them only in emergency cases show council messages in the footer I like this feature quite a bit it's just going to put everything at the bottom there enable auto tune this is a cool little feature not the auto tune music but what it does is it's going to have all the system tunables which are not populated by default it'll choose all the optimal configurations for this now I've never had a problem with it I'm always turning it on all the system tunables but if you do have problems turn that off there's not much it found in here it says generated by auto tune remember if it generates a couple more and reboot or not I always just turn it on in case there's anything I need to do or it needs to do in there updates by default already checked for being able to check there leave it at the stable don't accidentally choose this because if you choose a higher up it may not roll back properly matter of fact very likely it won't so there's kind of the basics for getting it set up now let's get to the important part the storage array so there's nothing in here know that nothing in the volume manager and you can see some deaths I don't know entries as we have none set up yet so we better in uh... we can import a volume if you were doing this and load and bring in other ones or you know the volume manager and let's set this up so this is here's our six drives and this is the system right here you can simply choose how you want the drives to be laid out so we go to raid z three we have a capacity of only sixteen gigs so yeah I'm sorry sixteen terabytes raid z would give us twenty seven terabytes but if any one drive fail that's it second try fails your loss raid z two gives us the twenty one point eighty two terabytes so we'll actually just call this drive uncreatively twenty one terabytes there's an encryption option give you a warning please read this you must back up the key you don't not back up the key and your thumb drives fail you are not getting back whatever's on that volume now I highly recommend encrypting the volume is one of the real reasons you encrypt it it's not you know just because you have personal stuff on there but a lot of people do but it's if you send those drives back where's the data going I know granted one drive fails they've only got enough data to maybe reassemble something but it's not worth the risk this way if a drive fails and you send it back there's no worry the drives encrypted and without that key they're not getting it so I highly recommend encryption but we're gonna show you how to back it up I highly recommend backing up the encryption key it's not hard to do but please store it in a safe place store it offline keep it somewhere wherever you need to keep it to make sure that you know if something happens you can get those drives back up and running if not you lose the key that's it now the volume is created these are just some of the council notifications that show up these are some of these show up on the council itself as well uh... whenever you create a volume so there's any errors you can look for me here this is also why I like the council being in a really accessible you just click this at the bottom and away you go so we can see it's uh... twenty one terabytes the raid z2 configuration so they're all in one large pool now designed a free nas I can't just add to this pool I can't just say let me throw another drive in and rebuild it it'll just add more magically there are a couple different uh... raid systems out there seen it have different options like that I think drobo has some uh... specialized raid system I'm very confident in the zfs file system a very confident in how it handles everything and so I'm fine with the fact that I can't expand it generally when I'm I build these I build out all the drives I'm going to put into a system and it's going to run for years until it's time to replace or upgrade that system now you can add this is just one set if you have like three more this is what we did in our machine we put in the four drives later we added a few more we have more expansion or you can get a card like a PCI card add more drives so you can add another volume you just can't change the existing by but easy solution copy everything from the original volume to the new one then remove it and now you can have the same system later on swap out bigger hard drives to it now this also is where you would replace a desk at a desk take a desk out of the pool uh... pretty straightforward if you had an extra disk you'll actually see an error on it would be offline you hit replace you would choose from the free pool i've got a separate video on how to swap out one of the uh... drives if they go bad so back over here storage now the next thing we're gonna do here is this is where we start setting up each one of the volumes now the way this company set up they have just one big share drive for the engineering team and that's who's going to be doing this so will this create one data set now we don't want to create a zeval that's different in the kind of special use which i won't get into for the most part you just want to be able to create data sets and will call it uh... shared drive shared drive and we're going to go ahead and add the data set now not going to be included in this video i'll do this as a separate video of the other they're going to be doing this with active directory integration so i'll do a whole separate videos of the i think they're that might be worthy of just a separate video in plus i don't have an active director to hook it up to you it's still at my office in testing here uh... part of the testing we do this is important to us because you don't realize your problems to start loading data i don't want to load the customer data and then learn a problem so we load test these and just find all kinds of stuff to put on there i've actually already went through one load test and then we actually just reset it again for the video uh... to make sure everything was good on this but load testing the machine is really really important so we dumped about four terabytes of data over to this drive destroyed it as in detached the array reset it then went and did it again and did it again so it's went through several uh... since we built it it's actually now been through a couple load tests and there was an error here we think we had a cdc cable loose unplugged plug it back in the error went away i did do some research and someone else had pointed out an error with these tries but there an error days it was one crc error so but we still keep an eye on everything to make sure it works all the distills show healthy and no issues at all alright so we have the drive set up they're configured and i had brought up making sure that you back everything up this is where you can get the keys now you can uh... rekey it and i think every time you add a uh... drive to the pool i think it automatically wants to rekey from not mistake and another video on that what we're gonna do right now is download the key because the key itself is not stored in the backup config so you have the backup config but you want to get this g l i dot key file it's really important to keep this dot key file there's really not much in this file either it's a very small little file keep it for the client because it will save you if ever everything happens this key g l l g l i key is stored within the usb drives if for some reason even though they're mirrored they fry the usb bus fries you're like oh cool i'm just gonna rebuild the box and import the volume you won't import the volume at all if you don't have that key even if you have the backup config so we go here to system general and we save the config here key is not in here just all the settings for free naster in here so you could end up in a lot of trouble you're like oh i don't have it well you have twenty one terabytes of encrypted information at that point if you didn't have it so just a side note make sure you back up that key and a backup of this storm in a safe place once you have this thing up and running go okay i got it configured and i'm gonna put my important things on it uh... do that configuration on there maybe next time i'll get in more in depth if there's some interest in how to set the shares and things like that it's not too hard to do uh... but thanks for watching if you like the content here like like and subscribe uh... if you have questions about the pre-nast bill reach out to me and uh... will cover any more questions or give you a more in-depth video on certain things on free nast thanks for watching