G'day

[Chr15]

Hi everyone. I'm just in the process of running through my system burn in tests, starting with memtest today & onto the HDD tests tomorrow and for the rest of the week. Having read a lot, and then some more, I'm hoping it all goes without hitches.

Good to be here - no doubt you'll see my name in a HELP!???1?! post if it goes tits up ;-)

 

[Jailer]

Welcome aboard! If you're this far in and doing the testing you described you're already a step ahead of most newcomers. :D

 

[Darren Myers]

Welcome welcome, what kind of system spec's did you go with?

 

[Chr15]

Welcome welcome, what kind of system spec's did you go with?

I had originally spec'd a Xeon based system with the Supermicro X10SL7-F Mobo but I couldn't find a case small enough to handle 6 HDDs in that (mATX) form factor whilst fitting into the cupboard I had earmarked for it. So, I switched to a mini-ITX system, so really the only differences from the original spec were the Mobo (and CPU, obviously) and case.

My setup is:
Asrock C2750D4i motherboard with Intel Avoton C2750 8-core CPU
32GB (4x8GB) Crucial ECC RAM (2x CT2KIT102472BD160B packs)
6 x WD RED 3TB HDDs for storage
2 x Sandisk Cruzer fit 16GB USB thumb drives (mirrored) for the OS. It's quite difficult to source SATA DOMs in the UK unfortunately, so I went with USB drives
Seasonic G450 modular PSU. I had originally got the G360 but swapped it out after realising it didn't have enough SATA cables for the HDDs
Fractal design node 304 case

I'm just waiting on a USB3.0 to USB2.0 header adapter to complete the hardware but I can progress the memory and HDD tests without that. I was originally a little concerned the PSU might be out of it's optimum efficiency range with the Avoton rather than the Xeon but I'll live with it unless I'm warned otherwise. In an ideal world I'd be running the Xeon (E3 1231 v3) instead of the Avoton but I wasn't prepared to have the box sited elsewhere in the house so dimensions won the day.

Thanks for the replies so far ;)

 

[Darren Myers]

nice choice in hardware and great choice in mirroring boot drives, theyre cheap insurance :P (cant think of who has that in there sig....) what RAIDz did you plan to go with for your x6 3Tb drives?

Also make sure if its going into a cupboard it has some good cooling so the drives and hardware dont cook, and you may want to add a small fan to the Avaton's heatsink just to make sure it stays nice and cool-ish

 

[Chr15]

nice choice in hardware and great choice in mirroring boot drives, theyre cheap insurance :p (cant think of who has that in there sig....) what RAIDz did you plan to go with for your x6 3Tb drives?

Also make sure if its going into a cupboard it has some good cooling so the drives and hardware dont cook, and you may want to add a small fan to the Avaton's heatsink just to make sure it stays nice and cool-ish

I bought 6 drives so I could go RAIDZ2 and still have a reasonably large amount of storage post-formatting/parity etc. I actually created a pool earlier with ~10.5TB formatted but I'll remove it before doing the burn in tests, I was just playing with the webGUI for a bit.

If anyone has a suggestion for an appropriate fan for the heatsink I'm all ears. The CPU temp is hovering around 48-52 C during memtest & I'm thinking that feels a little high.

 

[Darren Myers]

Well i would certainly go with RAIDz2 specially with the use of 3Tb hdds, and seeing as how you're already starting with large-ish drives im sure you will want to expand eventually so RAIDz2 gives you the best performance and storage for the amount of harddrives you have.

with the lovely calculator provided by @Bidule0hm http://biduleohm.free.fr/zfsraidsarc/ you'll get roughly 9.4Tb of usabe space which is pretty dam nice to have.

There was a post about a Avaton board and what fan the user used, i will see if i can find it

Not your board, but a similar one https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/freenas-components-crashing.36859/#post-225719

 

[Haysden Smart]

Great system, however I would trash the mirrored OS drives and use a hot/cold standby.

Use one as active, then when you have tested your configuration, back OT up to the other manually.

If you stuff up a configuration, simply set the cold/standby drive as the priority boot and start again.

If you mess up configuration in a mirror, it will be copied to both drives.

I have had more user errors in configuration that faults on USB thumb drives. And I still have a swap. So if a fault occurs, all I do is reboot with alternate USB drive.

Just a suggestion, many different views on here in regards to OS drives.

 

[diedrichg]

I have the Node 304 as a HTPC and the front fans may or may not spin up. I do have the fan controller set to the lowest setting and that is most likely the cause given that there may not be enough voltage for the initial spin-up. Just be careful! I plan to one day replace the fans with a pair of Noctuas.

 

[Chr15]

I have all the fans set to motherboard control and they're spinning fine.

Annoyingly I seem to have lost IPMI access (not lost per se but the default admin/admin user/pwd combination has suddenly stopped working not long after I'd finished the second run of memtest after the HDD burn in had also completed)

I can see the IPMI webpage (the Megarac SP frontend) but attempting to login just returns an 'invalid authentication' response - puzzling. I've had a thorough search and it appears I might need a BMC reset utility from ASRock themselves. This is the sort of thing that makes me question whether it was a good idea going with the ASRock. Guess I'll wait and see what their tech support comes back with.

 

[jgreco]

Welcome aboard! If you're this far in and doing the testing you described you're already a step ahead of most newcomers. :D

This. Exactly this.

 

[Chr15]

ASRock sent me a tool to reset the BMC password. Happy to have everything back & now in the process of setting FreeNAS up again from the latest stable build. Is it just me or does the existence of a BMC password reset tool not suggest known issues? Not that I'm expecting bug-free software or firmware, just that the inability to administer headless in such situations is a total killer for the use case.

Anyway I'll set things up over the weekend, mainly just a couple of network shares, some plugins (plex, transmission, couchpotato, BTsync possibly, openVPN) and see how it goes. Back to the reading.

 

[jgreco]

It is totally normal for there to be a tool that can twiddle with the BMC from the host platform, because the alternative would be that you'd have to open up a machine and hook up to an internal service port that could access the BMC, or something like that.