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NAS Unit (Part III)

You may know from the previous post that the new RAM arrived and I began the burn in testing.  First I ran the classic memtest86 from a bootable disk for 2-3 hours.  The RAM tested ok with no errors.  After running memtest86 I rebooted the system with Frenzy.  I started Frenzy with the GUI option and started the Stress Test.  Stress Test basically tests the RAM and cpu.  While Stress Test was running I ran some other tests on the NIC and hard drive.  In the end the system ran at 100% cpu load for ~7hours with a maxium cpu temperature of ~48 degrees celsius (max for the Athlon 4850e is 78c).  No errors with the NIC or hard drive.

In regards to the quirks with the hard drive it seems the most likely cause was that the Ubuntu partitions were not properly set up by the Ubuntu installation program.  After I convinced myself there was nothing wrong with the hard drive itself I deleted the Ubuntu partitions and went ahead and installed FreeNAS to a 96MB (the default) partition with the rest of the hard drive being partitioned as the data partition.

Configuring FreeNAS is easy and the webgui is self explanitory, just make sure you read the instructions on the screen after you initially install.  For this setup I’m running a CIFS/SMB share.  If you don’t know, this is basically a Windows shared folder.  After setting up the CIFS/SMB share I began some “real world” testing.  Mainly, transfering a bunch of files over the network to the shared folder.  Here’s some info:

lan: 100Mbps
wlan: 54Mbps

test 01 (data transfer lan==>lan; server==>nas; linux==>freenas;):
data: 701.8MB time: ~3min
test 02 (data transfer lan==>lan; server==>nas; linux==>freenas;):
data: 2.8GB time: ~8min
test 03 (data transfer lan==>wlan; nas==>laptop; freenas==>winxp;):
data: 701.8MB time: ~13min
test 04 (data transfer lan==>wlan; nas==>laptop; freenas==>winxp;):
data: 2.8GB  time: ~51min
Obviously, if you just have a 54Mbps wireless connection transfers could take some time.  I would recommend doing transfers over at least a 100Mbps cabled connection.  If you have a gigabit connection that would be sweet.
I’m thinking of doing some more burn in testing just to make sure there are not going to be any problems.  At this point I’m about 95% sure the system will be fine to handle even the most excessive usage.

Stay tuned for the follow up.