MindBender
Explorer
- Joined
- Oct 12, 2015
- Messages
- 67
My ReadyNAS 6 Pro is getting a bit slow and seems to get in a live-lock regularly after scrubbing the array, so it is time to replace it. I have been aware of FreeNAS for a long time, but didn’t dare to take the plunge, because I just wanted a box to safely store my data, not something I need to tinker with myself before getting it to work. But both my ReadyNAS 6 Pro and the Thecus that preceded it have been a bit of a disappointment (the latter more than the first), so I decided to go for FreeNAS. Base upon FreeBSD, built like a brick and supporting ZFS, what more could one want?
I’ve been doing a lot of research, the past couple of days; I’m on a holiday resort so I’ve got plenty of time, nothing to do and a good WiFi connection ;-). Now before I start ordering parts, I thought it may be a good idea to run my ideas by you guys.
CPU
At first I wanted to go for a Xeon E3-1285L, but after reading many reviews and benchmarks I decided to go for a Xeon D-1540, which will immediately limit my choice in mainboards.
Mainboard
My choice of mainboard is pretty much settled on the SuperMicro X10SDV-TLN4F. [Ordered]
Edit: The SuperMicro X10SDV-8C-TLN4F is identical, but with a passive heatsink, for setups with an airflow plan with which a fan may interfere. Chances are you aren't Dell or HP, and if you aren't, trust me: You don't have an airflow plan, so stay away from it.
Memory
I’m thinking about getting 2 DDR4 RDIMMs of 32GiB each, leaving to slots free to max it out later. The user’s manual shows only one tested DIMM, made by Samsung. In my mind, Samsung is still cheap Korean imitation stuff, but if SuperMicro trusts them, so will I. [Ordered]
Drives
For now I will reuse the drives from my ReadyNAS, which are 4x Seagate Constellation ES.2 Enterprise Grade 3TB drives. Seagate isn’t my favourite brand, but since all brands - including Seagate - have let me down, I decided to purchase drives of which I was 100% sure there were Enterprise Grade. So far they have been holding up well. I may add a 5th (and 6th) drive to improve RAIDZ1 (or RAIDZ2) performance.
I’m also considering to add two Seagate Archive 8TB drives, just for backups.
Boot disk
For previous customers I have done extensive research on NAND flash reliability and especially power-fail robustness, all the way down to flash translations layers remapping bad erase blocks and levelling wear evenly across the NAND flash device, and doing that concurrently. They just cannot seem to get cross-page corruptions in MLC NANDs right, or at least not concurrently across a power failure. The conclusion was that there are no devices doing that 100% reliable, which was to be expected, but also that there are very, very few devices doing a pretty decent job. The investigation covered both SD-Cards and USB flash drives. I haven’t done any research on SSDs, but I have had a couple during the past few years and all failed undetected until it was too late. These drives include an OWC Mercury Extreme PCIe card, an OZC RevoDrive X2 PCIe card and multiple OCZ Vertex drives.
The Mainboard I have chosen does have an M.2 slot and again I’m tempted to put an SSD in. Selecting a PCIe V3.0 module is especially attractive, because that will make all 6 SATA connections on the board available for drives. Unfortunately the only PCIe M.2 module I could find is a €300 Samsung 950 Pro of 512GiB. That seems like a bit overkill. For that kind of money I’d rather have a smaller SLC based drive.
Case
The case is a bit of a problem. I found my Thecus NAS a big turn-off from the moment I opened the box and felt the flimsy plastic drive trays. The ReadyNAS drive trays a much better. In my experience I don’t think I will ever need more than 6 drives, because experience teaches me that I usually replace them before adding a 7th drive. But the bare minimum is 5, due to RAIDZ1 performance. The SilverStone D380 is a no-go because of the flimsy drive trays. The SilverStone CS01-HS is still a contender, but may be just a flimsy. The Norco ITX-S8 may have better drive trays, but is flimsy on the rest. And I don’t have any information on the build quality of the U-NAS NSC-800. This latter is my favourite, but I already know that the PCIe extender causes bus errors, so that doesn’t make a good impression. [Ordered]
If only there were a well-build case, like my ReadyNAS, with decent drive trays and a display on the front….
Power supply
The power supply depends on the case I will choose, and on the number of drives it can house. Dimensioning it is not an easy problem to solve. Most power supplies peak in efficiency around 50% of their maximum capacity. Efficiency for loads under 20% often isn't specified, while my system will spend most of it's time in idle. So I need to determine the load bandwidth and try to map that on the 20...80% range of a power supply. Unfortunately the higher-efficiency power supplies are also the higher capacity power supplies; 80 Plus gold supplies start at 400Watt, meaning that their efficiency rating starts at 20% of that, being 80Watt. My will only use that kind of power a small part of the time. 80 Plus bronze supplies start at 250Watt, making it hit 81% efficiency from a load of 50 Watt and up. I still don't think my setup will do that in idle with the drives spun down, but in reality I have never seen my ReadyNAS or Thecus spin down any drives, so I'll keep them running and the 50Watt limit won't be a problem.
I will probably end up with a SeaSonic; I have read many good things about them.
What do you guys think of my proposed build?
I’ve been doing a lot of research, the past couple of days; I’m on a holiday resort so I’ve got plenty of time, nothing to do and a good WiFi connection ;-). Now before I start ordering parts, I thought it may be a good idea to run my ideas by you guys.
CPU
At first I wanted to go for a Xeon E3-1285L, but after reading many reviews and benchmarks I decided to go for a Xeon D-1540, which will immediately limit my choice in mainboards.
Mainboard
My choice of mainboard is pretty much settled on the SuperMicro X10SDV-TLN4F. [Ordered]
Edit: The SuperMicro X10SDV-8C-TLN4F is identical, but with a passive heatsink, for setups with an airflow plan with which a fan may interfere. Chances are you aren't Dell or HP, and if you aren't, trust me: You don't have an airflow plan, so stay away from it.
Memory
I’m thinking about getting 2 DDR4 RDIMMs of 32GiB each, leaving to slots free to max it out later. The user’s manual shows only one tested DIMM, made by Samsung. In my mind, Samsung is still cheap Korean imitation stuff, but if SuperMicro trusts them, so will I. [Ordered]
Drives
For now I will reuse the drives from my ReadyNAS, which are 4x Seagate Constellation ES.2 Enterprise Grade 3TB drives. Seagate isn’t my favourite brand, but since all brands - including Seagate - have let me down, I decided to purchase drives of which I was 100% sure there were Enterprise Grade. So far they have been holding up well. I may add a 5th (and 6th) drive to improve RAIDZ1 (or RAIDZ2) performance.
I’m also considering to add two Seagate Archive 8TB drives, just for backups.
Boot disk
For previous customers I have done extensive research on NAND flash reliability and especially power-fail robustness, all the way down to flash translations layers remapping bad erase blocks and levelling wear evenly across the NAND flash device, and doing that concurrently. They just cannot seem to get cross-page corruptions in MLC NANDs right, or at least not concurrently across a power failure. The conclusion was that there are no devices doing that 100% reliable, which was to be expected, but also that there are very, very few devices doing a pretty decent job. The investigation covered both SD-Cards and USB flash drives. I haven’t done any research on SSDs, but I have had a couple during the past few years and all failed undetected until it was too late. These drives include an OWC Mercury Extreme PCIe card, an OZC RevoDrive X2 PCIe card and multiple OCZ Vertex drives.
The Mainboard I have chosen does have an M.2 slot and again I’m tempted to put an SSD in. Selecting a PCIe V3.0 module is especially attractive, because that will make all 6 SATA connections on the board available for drives. Unfortunately the only PCIe M.2 module I could find is a €300 Samsung 950 Pro of 512GiB. That seems like a bit overkill. For that kind of money I’d rather have a smaller SLC based drive.
Case
The case is a bit of a problem. I found my Thecus NAS a big turn-off from the moment I opened the box and felt the flimsy plastic drive trays. The ReadyNAS drive trays a much better. In my experience I don’t think I will ever need more than 6 drives, because experience teaches me that I usually replace them before adding a 7th drive. But the bare minimum is 5, due to RAIDZ1 performance. The SilverStone D380 is a no-go because of the flimsy drive trays. The SilverStone CS01-HS is still a contender, but may be just a flimsy. The Norco ITX-S8 may have better drive trays, but is flimsy on the rest. And I don’t have any information on the build quality of the U-NAS NSC-800. This latter is my favourite, but I already know that the PCIe extender causes bus errors, so that doesn’t make a good impression. [Ordered]
If only there were a well-build case, like my ReadyNAS, with decent drive trays and a display on the front….
Power supply
The power supply depends on the case I will choose, and on the number of drives it can house. Dimensioning it is not an easy problem to solve. Most power supplies peak in efficiency around 50% of their maximum capacity. Efficiency for loads under 20% often isn't specified, while my system will spend most of it's time in idle. So I need to determine the load bandwidth and try to map that on the 20...80% range of a power supply. Unfortunately the higher-efficiency power supplies are also the higher capacity power supplies; 80 Plus gold supplies start at 400Watt, meaning that their efficiency rating starts at 20% of that, being 80Watt. My will only use that kind of power a small part of the time. 80 Plus bronze supplies start at 250Watt, making it hit 81% efficiency from a load of 50 Watt and up. I still don't think my setup will do that in idle with the drives spun down, but in reality I have never seen my ReadyNAS or Thecus spin down any drives, so I'll keep them running and the 50Watt limit won't be a problem.
I will probably end up with a SeaSonic; I have read many good things about them.
What do you guys think of my proposed build?
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