jamaican.mekrazy

Thanks, Joshua!

@nugglet TGIF! Yes. I began with the default pool size that HexOS recommended. Then before transferring data, I expanded it one SSD at a time until the maximum recommended drives had been reached. All 37TB of data has been transferred. To date, 100% healthy and zero errors.

I'll second that... Welcome, @beardedbrewer!

@Mobius To be honest, I don't plan on slowing down any time soon. The only factor will be cost. The 12x8TB SSDs I currently have cost me a bit over $300 USD each just one year ago and now cost over $550. Would I be able to expand my pool by slipping in some additional, less expensive, brand/model of the same capacity I wonder?

Hello Nerds! About me...okay, here goes. I acquired the nickname Bull when my boss saw me at work after having cut my hair and shaved my head, He thought I looked like Bull Shannon (Richard Moll) of Night Court. I'm a nerd, through and through and currently live in Maine. I became interested in science and technology in middle school (grades seven and eight), starting with astronomy, photography and later, astrophotography (anything space). At the time the family was living in a ~150 year-old farm and I had set up a little b/w darkroom in the basement. By junior-high, personal computing was just starting out (this was in the early 70's) and I fell in love. I always wanted an S100-bus computer like the IMSAI 8080 or SOL-20, but could never afford one and ended up buying a Radio Shack Model 1 which sported a whopping 4kB of RAM, a monochrome monitor and a cassette tape recorder for permanent storage. I remember learning Basic and a little Assembly and writing my first real program - a simple planetary statistics database. In the late 70's my sister and I were lucky enough to have access to the Bates College Computing Center as mom was employed with the college. From the main terminal room located in the old Corum Library I was able to access the Dartmouth College Time Share and was introduced to what would soon become the internet. I remember spending hours on a program called Xcaliber, chatting with students at Dartmouth, as well as kids of family members there. I even wrote my own chat program that allowed more than the 20-person limit at the time. It was there that I was introduced to C, PL/1 and CPL (Command Processing Language - kind of like Primes version of PowerShell). After school I worked at various places and ended up working for Bates College in the computing department as an electronics technician during the day (doing board-level work as well as assembling PCs for the campus and network wiring) and as a systems operator for a few hours a night doing full and incremental backups of the twin PR1ME 9750 mainframes to high-speed tape. The mid-80's is when I built my first x286 and also selling them to friends through word-of-mouth. It was at this point when I also wrote some software, just for curiosities sake (a database management system, a word processor, a file encryption utility (using an algorthm provided by the very smart son of the Bates College Computing director, as well as a video store POS system for my mom and sister's business). I haven't done much since then, aside from my own personal journey in tech and my love for film and music. And this leads to my confession... I am a data packrat, which is why I became interested in NAS's in the first place. I started storing my photography, movies and music on a 5-bay DAS box in JBOD-mode, but always knew that was a disaster waiting to happen. I currently have over 5,000 films, 200 television shows/streaming series, 500 documentaries, 51,000 songs from 5000 albums covering 377 artists, not to mention my photography library, NFL Superbowl collection, 800 music videos and hundreds of concerts and rockumentaries. I know, I need an intervention. Of course I haven't viewed all of this content. I guess I'm just an archivist at heart. Besides, I'll need something to watch once I retire.

@Dylan https://www.briggsandstratton.com/na/en_us/support/results.multiStepManualSearch.html?searchrequested=01938-0

@ubergeek I wish. It's a Briggs & Stratton 12kW (01938-0) propane standby generator that my folks had installed when our 2-story Cape was built back in '89? I think. It gets yearly servicing and is still going strong.

The HULK is just a media storage/streaming device. Once my files are transferred I'll be able to get a better picture of the read speeds during streaming (at most, two simultaneous). It may be that L2ARC might help me there. As to the files, they are all standard 1.2GB-1.8GB 1080p MP4 and MKV files (though I do have an occasional 50GB+ file). I do realize that a mish-mash of file sizes can have throughput results like I was seeing but I'm almost certain that is not the case here. It is possible that cached data took a while to transfer from SLC to permanent storage, and once it caught up things perked up? I also found that the drives I'm using are notorious for slow write speeds due to said cache type. I also want to look into something called overprovisioning which allows the SLC cache size to be increased... perhaps a performance gain is to be had there, but I'll only be able to test this out if I can find some Linux software similar in functionality to Samsung's Magician. I know... I talk a lot. It's not often I get to pick the brains of a community of high-thinking people. I very much appreciate all your help.

@DomSmith Thank you for the ideas, Dom. I'll try them. Yes, the NAS is connected to it's own 1000VA UPS (the smaller one) via the lower power distribution bar. The remainder of my network (main PC, RUST game server, NUC 8i7 torrent PC and a MinisForum SFF Linux PC) are connected to the 1500VA UPS via the upper bar. Everything is handled by an auto-engaging propane generator that runs the whole house. 30 seconds after power failure and I'm back up and off UPS power. I removed the 24-port patch bar sometime after taking the photo, as I didn't really need it. @PsychoWards Thank you for the thumbs-up! So the L2ARC cache is for reads only? Update: Since the initial post the transfer speed miraculously bumped itself up to 235MB/s and has remained steady for hours. I'm not going to complain, though I do wonder... Is my connection between PC and NAS travelling from PC to Switch to NAS (as I presume) or from PC to Switch to Router to Switch to NAS? If the later, it would explain the 235MB/s limit as the router only supports 2.5GB/s. My apology in advance if this question needs to be moved to a new forum category.

All righty then... My first-ever NAS was using TrueNAS and was a trial-by-fire, to say the least. This time, after watching a HexOS demo by Linus (LTT) I decided to give it a try. It went super smoothly and I'm very impressed. My hardware configuration: # PlinkUSA RackBuy IPC-G3550X 3U Server Chassis # MSI MAG B550M Mortar MAX WiFi Motherboard # AMD Ryzen 5 5600G 4.4GHz 6-Core 12-Thread Processor # 32GB (2x16GB) G.SKILL Trident Z-Series DDR4 3200MT/s CL14-14-14-34 Memory # 1TB Kingston FURY Renegade PCIe Gen 4.0 NVMe OS Drive # (12) 8TB SAMSUNG 870 QVO SATA III SSDs # 10Gb Dual RJ45 (Intel X540-T2) PCIe 3.0 x8 Network Card # LSI Logic 9300-16i 16Port 12Gb/s SAS PCIe 3.0 x 8 HBA Controller # (3) ICY DOCK 6-Bay 2.5” SATA HDD / SSD Hot Swap Tool-Less Backplane Enclosure with Dual Cooling Fan for 5.25” Bay # FSP Twins Pro ATX PS2 1+1 Dual Module 500W Certified Efficiency ≥90% Hot-swappable Redundant Digital Power Supply So without further ado I bring you The HULK... I'm currently in the process of transferring about 42TB of media from a Yottamaster 5-Bay USB 3.2 HDD enclosure to the new pool. Currently I'm seeing an average transfer rate of about 30MB/s which is super slow considering everything is 10G (switch, nics) and using Cat8 cabling. I have checked the link speeds and they are all reporting 10G. It might be a device cache limitation. The first ~2GB of any transfer is faster (>1GB/s). I think I may have to look into a second M.2 for a cache drive. That's my opinion, I welcome yours. :)