Have been working the NAS hard for a few days… stability has improved a lot but when moving large amount of data into the machine is still somewhat unstable.
As I am migrating all my data from all sorts of portable drives into the server, I am often copying 100+GB at a time. I can’t find any specific patterns yet, but it seems that while gani driver is hugely better than the default Realtek driver, it can still have stability issue. Good thing is that gani driver never totally locks up. I have yet need to reboot it to regain network connection. However, I think while copying huge amount of data (unqualified at this time), gani Realtek driver can still become temporarily unresponsive.
In order to avoid having to recopy everything, I use Microsoft’s SyncToy 2.0 to verify if the directories are in sync. I could have use Rsync, but most of my client machines are on Windows, so this looks to be the best free tool. However, I found a strange behaviour with SyncToy 2. If I am syncing large directory and it needs to copy a lot of data to the destination drive, if the target path becomes unresponsive, SyncToy would spit out the error that the target path is not found. However, trying to rerun it, it would still spit out the same error, even though the network share is working just fine.
I think there is a bug in the way SyncToy maintains the ‘work file’ data (it saves some checksum I think in a file on the directory).
Maybe it is time to find another sync program… Can’t wait for OpenSolaris’s ZFS dedupe functionality to arrive…
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Bill on 08.25.2009
I’ve never tried SyncToy, but I have found a nice utility called FreeFileSync from http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/
I like the feature of saving sync actions into script files. These script files can be opened directly, kicking off the particular sync they are configured to do. I have one that lives in my Windows Startup folder that syncs my D;\Images folder with my Z:\imagebackup folder. (Z is an internal backup-only drive for first level file redundancy) I haven’t tried it in a while, but I seem to recall that I can open multiple sync scripts at the same time and they’ll all run concurrently.
Once I get my NAS/VM box up, I’ll be giving it some excercise with these scripts.
ps – I’m doing something much like you are, but in addition to ZFS storage, I need to run multiple MS servers in VMs on the same box. Do you have an opinion on OpenSolaris + VirtualBox vs Server 2008 core + Hyper-V ?
hsiaom on 08.26.2009
Looks interesting with freefilesync. Having individual action as a script is definitelly a plus, wich allow for unattended and automatic sync. While SyncToy is easy to use (you save each sync pair as a sync item and just click and run), it is not as action free as the one you have suggested.
If you have a good CPU with enough RAM, I think your idea with OpenSolaris + VirtualBox for various MS server is a great idea, which I would have tried it if not for the fact that Atom 330 is just not powerful enough. OpenSolaris as based OS on the hardware (so disk access is most direct and speedy) and having the MS Servers just to serve file or act as an IIS server (while logically partitioned away from the underlying hardware) would be something I would love to try out.
I am toying with the idea to install VirtualBox and install a LAMP stack for a photo gallery…. using Linux might be good for me with only 2GB of RAM.
Have you heard of or tried Xen server? It is OpenSource (Citrix has an implementation as well) and allow you to do Hyper-V like environment completely free. I am not that familiar with Hypervisor kind of setup yet. Love to try it out but have no spare machine to do it….
Do share you hardware list and your findings!