Suggestions on what software to use for data storage

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nanodisk

New Member
Dec 23, 2021
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Hey everyone, in a bit of a pickle at the moment. So at the office we have a server running Windows Server 2019 with 3 x 12tb hdd in raid 5 and a separate 2tb ssd to work off of. Currently running standard 1gig across the network as windows doesn't even fully utilize the 1gig connection.

Now we have to copy over all of work from the ssd to the hdd at least a couple times a week and the size can vary from 30gb all the way to 100gb+. And then sometimes we have to copy from the hdd to a USB which is painful. The biggest problem we face is that all of the files we copy are extremely small and there are thousands of them at a time, and Windows absolutely hates these small files.

So we are now looking for an alternative which still allows us to have Windows Active Directory (this is a must due to it being a closed network). Whilst being as fast as possible without having to fork out on new hardware.

I've been looking at TrueNAS but have become lost in the sea of different file system types as well as having trouble trying to get the VM to detect the storage pool I created on TrueNAS. So any suggestions or help on this would be highly appreciated :)
 

BlueFox

Legendary Member Spam Hunter Extraordinaire
Oct 26, 2015
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Just an FYI that the speed thing you are seeing with numerous small files is not specific to Windows.
 

Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
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Hey everyone, in a bit of a pickle at the moment. So at the office we have a server running Windows Server 2019 with 3 x 12tb hdd in raid 5 and a separate 2tb ssd to work off of. Currently running standard 1gig across the network as windows doesn't even fully utilize the 1gig connection.

...
I've been looking at TrueNAS but have become lost in the sea of different file system types as well as having trouble trying to get the VM to detect the storage pool I created on TrueNAS. So any suggestions or help on this would be highly appreciated :)
Whats the relationship of your physical 2019 box to a vm that doesnt find a pool?

A vm (on 2019 ?) wouldnt see a pool, only a shared FS (cifs/smb)

You want to repurpose the 2019 HW for another OS?
Is that a hardware raid controller in it? Thats not going to work well with a software raid approach...

Else - is this copying from fast pool (ssd) to slow pool (hdd) to very slow pool (usb) for permanent storage or what are your goals here?
 

nanodisk

New Member
Dec 23, 2021
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0
1
Whats the relationship of your physical 2019 box to a vm that doesnt find a pool?

A vm (on 2019 ?) wouldnt see a pool, only a shared FS (cifs/smb)

You want to repurpose the 2019 HW for another OS?
Is that a hardware raid controller in it? Thats not going to work well with a software raid approach...

Else - is this copying from fast pool (ssd) to slow pool (hdd) to very slow pool (usb) for permanent storage or what are your goals here?
So I think the reason my Windows VM isn't seeing the folder is due to not having a pass through so that should be an easy fix.

We don't have a hardware raid controller and not planning on doing so either.

With regards to the last point. The idea we came up with is to see if we can combine the ssd and hdd to run in raidz2 so the ssd is what we work off and the hdd will be the mirrored data and then use snapshots to back up as we see fit. The USBs are for when we need to provide the data and sometimes we've already moved our data off the ssd and onto the hdd so that's why it takes so long. But the USB part isn't to worry about as much tbh.

I've been suggested to use proxmox and run both win server and truenas in separate VM and go from there. I haven't got round to testing this out but that is what I'll try next.

The biggest struggle we have is trying to find something which allows to continue to have AD, allows us to make incremental backups, whilst being fast to work off which win server is not