I have been looking into Rockstor for a while now and finally decided to do a newish build, some old parts some new, and give it a go and figured I would post how it is going. The only new parts to the build are the system board and processor, memory and 10Gb NIC is from another server I was no longer using, the 3Tb drives drives are from my old FreeNAS box.
Supermicro Micro ATX X11SSL-CF system board
Intel Xeon Processor E3-1275 v5 processor
16 Gb of Samsung DDR4 2133Mhz ECC
HP 10Gb NIC
Rockstor is currently installed on an old 160Gb laptop drive just to get it up and running and try it out, its running off the onboard SATA controller. Will move to a small SSD down the road.
My data is residing on 4 x 3Tb Hitachi 7200 RPM SATA drives configured as a 5.4TB Raid 1 Pool running off the LSI-3008 SAS controller on the system board.
I am currently copying my data off my Windows server, transferring at between 3 and 3.5 Gbps on large files, its coming off a nVME SSD in the Windows server.
I will probably add a few SSDs in a separate pool for faster storage and use the Hitachi’s for backups.
My one question is will Rockstor always cache all of the the available memory like this and if so, is 16Gb enough memory for this configuration.
First file copy completed to the new Rockstor, 1.43Tb in 1 hour 55 minutes across 10Gb Ethernet.
I did a comparison writing to and reading from the new Rockstor using a 6.4 Gb iso. From a Windows server with a PCIe NVME drive to the 4 disk Raid 1 pool in the Rockstor, 6.4 Gb written in 15 seconds. Reading from the Rockstor and writting to the NVME, 6.4 Gb in 7 seconds. This is via a mapped drive on the Windows server connecting to a Samba share on the Rockstor. I’ll take that as I will be doing more reading from it than writing to it.
This is a nice board. Thx for sharing. I had bought a x7dcl-3 a couple years back. It’s now running Rockstor and the main OS is on a 150 GB WD Raptor. I then have two drives, one 5T and another 4T. Then 24 GB DDR3. It all still works well. I hope my next board has the html5 KVM. The Java KVMs are very antiquated and very sluggish.
Nice setup and thanks for the feedback / reporting.
Memory used as cache is essentially harmless as it will be dropped the instant more pressing use of that memory is required; so no worries there. As for if it’s enough: the fact that there is room for that much caching means there is little memory pressure just yet. There are others on the forum who could answer this question in more detail but just my chip-in. Essentially the linux kernel will use all available memory for what ever it can and often that is cache.
Thanks, I just wasn’t sure on the memory usage. I loaded up ZoneMinder and have 6 of my HD cameras configured, its hovering around 9% used and 34% cached now, CPU is about 45% average with Zoneminder running. This has been the easier NAS config I have ever done. I did throw 2 Samsung SATA 3 SSD in it today in Raid 1 to check file read and write performance. From the NVME in the windows box to the SATA3 and back, NVME to SATA3 SSD averaged 3.5Gbps, SATA 3 SSD back to nvme 7.2Gbps.
Nice. Did you use the Rock-on zoneminder? If so have you seen our ZoneMinder Rock-on write up. It’s for the older 1.29 variant. Also interested in your experience, if any, of the zmNinja app referenced there?
Are your cameras accessed via ip? I installed and am due to do another maintenance visit soon of a Rockstor / zoneminder setup that uses a single original Y-cam Bullet (pre hd) that’s been outside ‘weathering it up’ since it first came out around 2010. Only failure being the sdcard (at least to date) and a homeplug used to connect it to the LAN via it’s power feed; oh and an inode exhaustion one time, oops. Early on I used ‘hand rolled’ Ubuntu Server, as Rockstor didn’t exist. I was much relieved when forum member @magicalyak contributed the zoneminder Rock-on and jumped right on it. I ended up using zoneminders RTP/RTSP method to retrieve the cameras mpeg4 stream in the end.
Yes I used the Rock-On ZoneMinder version 1.3, I did use the write up you mentioned and it was spot on. My cameras are all 1080 IP cameras, configured in ZoneMinder using RTP. Added my 7th camera today, took a little work to get it functioning as not much is mentioned on the web about configuring ZoneMinder to work with it. The first 6 are all identical so once I had 1 working I just cloned it and changed the IP Haven’t looked into the mobile apps yet, I set up security on the website and access it from phones and tablet, works well.
I loaded zmNinja on both my Android tablet and my Samsung S6 Active, seems to work very well. It has a good interface and seems very stable, so far so good.
Just wanted to post an update, I have been running this build just on 30 days now and its been rock solid. Plex and Zoneminder Rock-Ons are running flawless. I have removed disks, added disks, converted from raid 10 to raid 1 and back to raid 10 without issue, this was done while upgrading the ancient Hitachi drives with WD Gold drives.
Haven’t looked into the mobile apps yet, I set up security on the website and access it from phones and tablet, works well.