Replacing drives with larger drives - 5Big Network 2

[ChrilleCrull]

@naspa
Thank you!

Interesting what you say about a hybrid disk, I had those thoughts yesterday :-)But Im glad to say as of right now the NAS is working very good with fvwd's option one :applause

@fvdw
This firmware seems excellent and if I use a 2TB disk as primary I really just "loose" 2 TB of space, I put 4x4TB disks in bay 2-4 in a Raid 5 and use the 2Tb disk in bay 1 to other stuff. :woohoo
To be able to manage the disks seperatly in booth raid and as single disk is just how I like it! Thanks for your help, I will defenatly consider the other options further on, it would be interesting to try.

Is it possible to increase the write and read speed of the 5big2? I have around 30MB/s Write/Read or is the I/O completely limited to Lacie hardware.

[fvdw]

Glad to hear that you like our efforts and firmware. Btw we have a donate button :whistle

About speed. When using ext4 on non raid and large files you should be able to get 40 MB/s write and 60 MB/s read on samba.
This under condition that no other user is accesing the nas also and no media server is streaming files or building its database. The cpu of the 5big2 is only 800 Mhz and ram 512 MB that limits the speed. Also copying small files will be significant slower due to file info like headers to be written to disk.
Maybe performance can be lower on a raid as multiple disk must be written. I personally don't use raid, but Jocko does. Maybe he can comment on speed using raid5

Ps we are working on a new firmware release. Probably it will be based on a more recent kernel 4.18.7 and containing an upgrade of samba from version 3.0.37 to 4.8.3. The old one only support smb 1 protocol, the new samba also smb2 and smb3 which might further increase transfer rates although the newer code may also need more cpu power and as result may have lower transfer rate. To avoid that we are minimizing it taking out all not required options. Last tests with the minimized 4.8.3 are encouraging.
Until now we kept the old version in the firmware because newer version were slower in file transfer due to higher cpu load.
As soon as we have finished test with the minimized version of most recent samba version and using smb2 or smb3 we will report more if it improves speed and if it will be integrated in the new firmware release.

[fvdw]

I edited my previous post

[ChrilleCrull]

Looking for that button yesterday I was, hit it I have! ;-)

I did get around what you say in speed when using my other NAS with 5x1TB raid0, I think the speed decrease a little with Raid5 on just 3 disks right now, it might get a little better when I add the last 4TB disk.

I did think the NAS had quite small CPU and RAM but did not think it was that small. Then I understand the limitation can be related to CPU load. Im really looking forward to the new firmware and hear about the tests of the minimized samba version now :-) I hope it will increase the speed, even the slightest would be a nice bonus :-)

Can I change the primary disk in Bay 1 to a larger 2TB and restore all settings I made already ? I noticed there was a "BackupNasDB" but where does it store?

[Jocko]

Hi

About raid performance,

With a raid0 you have a R/W speed much fast but without safety (as soon as a disk is dead, you lose all your data), can get a read speed around 160MB/s with 5 disks and 70-80MB/s on write speed

with a raid1 or raid5, read speed is around 30-40MB/s but write speed is slower : 20-30MB/s. Note: with a raid5, the limit is the cpu usage and then there is no significant change with the disk number

[fvdw]

Can I change the primary disk in Bay 1 to a larger 2TB and restore all settings I made already ? I noticed there was a "BackupNasDB" but where does it store?

You could do that by copying all files on partition sda5 of the 1TB disk to your 2TB disk. When firmware is running sda5 is mounted on folder /rw_fs. The nas database is stored in /rw_fs/etc.
However overwriting that folder wiith running firmware is not recommended as some files are in use.
You could make a tar archive of the content of the rw_fs folder incl subfolders for instance using ssh server when firmware is running. Move the archive to a shared folder and then copy your tar archive to the tftp folder of the fvdw-sl console and use it during installation of the firmware on your new disk.
That woul then go like this.
Remove all disks and put your 2TB disk in slot 1. Install firware using fvdw-sl console.
Then after having installed the firmware on your new disk don't reboot and keep telnet open, transfer the sda5 tar archive from the oc to the nas using the tftp server via the telnet client, first mount sda5 and unpack the archive like this

Code: Select all

mkdir sda5
tfpt -r your-sda5.tar -l /sda5/sda5.tar -g ip-of-your-pc
cd /sda5
tar -xvf sda5.tar
cd /
umount sda5

Ready, poweroff, put the other 4 disks in an boot and keep your fingers crossed. If you have done it correctly and I did not make type errors in the commands the nas should come up with your old settings

[ChrilleCrull]

Hello again!

Thank you for all advice everything workt like a charm :-)

I will follow up on the next FW update with excitement, :bananadance