SOLVED Temporary disruption of USB drives

[vamfoom]

My current setup is consuming 65watt of electricity. I want to move this to a laptop that I know consumes a lot less pwer. The problem is that I would need to connect the drives via USB. I had a similar setup with Debian Linux before which is often problematic at times -- sometimes just moving the USB drives would cause a disconnection which ends up hanging the storage subsystem that cannot be fixed without a reboot. Since FreeNAS runs on freebsd, how does it deal with a temporary disruption? If a connection comes back, does it magically resume?

 

[blueether]

USB data storage is very much discouraged around here, as is running FreeNAS on a laptop

 

[PhiloEpisteme]

Since FreeNAS runs on freebsd, how does it deal with a temporary disruption? If a connection comes back, does it magically resume?

If connection to a drive is lost but no vdevs are lost a pool will enter a degraded state which will typically require some manual intervention to reinstate the drive. You'll probably want to run a scrub too after such events to make sure that no data as corrupted. In some cases you may need to resilver the drive to add it back to the vdev.

Echoing @blueether, running FreeNAS on a laptop might not give you the results you're looking for. The primary issues are reliability of the system and reliability of the drives connected to your system.

FreeNAS uses ZFS to control the drives and ZFS likes direct, reliable access to your disks. If you go with external USB enclosures you're adding additional hardware, often of dubious quality, between your board and your drives. Drives dropping out temporarily is not uncommon and USB ports can themselves go bad. By using external drives connected via USB you greatly diminish ZFS's ability to control and monitor your drives and increase the likelihood of a drive going bad and having to replace a disk which increases the likelihood of losing data.

I think the bottom line is that FreeNAS was built with data integrity as a core goal and server grade hardware helps fulfill that goal. If your primary goal is data integrity then FreeNAS is great on the appropriate hardware. If you're not looking for a build centered around keeping your bits all in line you can certainly build a NAS out of a laptop, but I would suggest that you may be happier not going with FreeNAS in that case.

I would venture though that whatever you chose if you go with external usb enclosures you'll likely experience reliability issues as those are not an issue with FreeNAS and more an issue with those types of enclosures. I'm not an expert on them so I can't point you to the more reliable ones either. Even the best usb enclosures won't touch the reliability of internal SATA or SAS drives or a JBOD case connected via a SAS expander and HBA.

 

[pschatz100]

Most laptops require proprietary device drivers, which FreeBSD will not have. If it even runs, it will not be reliable.

To the OP: What is the issue with 65 watts of electricity? How much lower do you expect to go on a laptop?

 

[vamfoom]

I replaced it with an HPE Microserver which idles at 17watt with 3 drives. I'm no longer using a laptop.

Thanks

 

[pschatz100]

Just curious... How much money does that save you?

 

[vamfoom]

Quite a bit actually. All the watts add up. I'm in California where PGE charges you on a tiered system. If you use a lot of electricity, it could move you up to a high-cost tier where each watt costs a fortune. This summer, my cost went down from $600 a month to $300 a month. This isn't the only device I replaced.