Will It FreeNAS??

[TranceKat]

Hi all,
Taking a different tact with my second post. Will this FreeNAS?

Component	Solution	Cost
Mobo	SuperMicro X9DRH-IF	140
CPU	E5-2650 v2 X2	130
Chassis	Fractal Design XL R2	145
CPU Cooler	Arctic Freezer 12	100
RAM	64GB (4x16GB) PC3-8500R DDR3-1066MHz 4Rx4 Reg ECC Edge 16GE604R04	70
PSU	Seasonic Focus GX-550, 550W 80+ Gold, Full-Modular	100
CPU bracket	N/A	0
Fans	Pure Wings 2 1x120, 1x140	25
SSDs	Old Transcend SSD340 TS256GSSD340	0
HBA	LSI SAS9200-8i IBM 46C8937 9200-8i IT	30

The intent is to run ESXi as the host, and FreeNAS as a guest, along with a few VMs and Containers (Zoneminder, Embry).

Thank you.

 

[sretalla]

Certainly looks OK.

You may want to look into the PID fan control scripts for it as this will help to keep the disks at a good temperature with quiet fan operation when possible.

 

[ornias]

LSI SAS9200-8i IBM 46C8937 9200-8i IT for 30 bucks? Wow, you must live in the USA :P
Config is nice, ZFS wise, should've give much of a problem...

That being said:

Arctic Freezer 12	You should be able to get a noctua for that price, for ex. the NH-U12A
Seasonic Focus GX-550	For the same money there is the: Cooler Master V Series V550 Which is one of the best PSU's out there with top-of-class idle efficency
Pure Wings 2	Medium-class fans, not great, not good... but quite a high pricepoint imho

Rest is perfectly fine! :)

You may want to look into the PID fan control scripts for it as this will help to keep the disks at a good temperature with quiet fan operation when possible.

Disk overheats are pretty rare with such a (relatively!) low number of disks... Not saying it wouldn't happen, but i've run similar cases with a decent number of known hot-head toshiba disks without any problem temperature wise. (even when stressing all disks with transfers for 24 hours)

 

[sretalla]

Disk overheats are pretty rare with such a (relatively!) low number of disks... Not saying it wouldn't happen, but i've run similar cases with a decent number of known hot-head toshiba disks without any problem temperature wise. (even when stressing all disks with transfers for 24 hours)

My point was more about the quiet operation... letting the mobo manage fans according to CPU temps can get the required fan speeds very wrong and you can have a much noisier box than needed to keep your disks healthy. It's entirely optional, but I find it very helpful for me.

 

[ornias]

My point was more about the quiet operation... letting the mobo manage fans according to CPU temps can get the required fan speeds very wrong and you can have a much noisier box than needed to keep your disks healthy. It's entirely optional, but I find it very helpful for me.

Ahh, now I get you.. it was the other way around, sorry for the misunderstanding!

Yes, CPU-temp focus tends to run the lower case fans harder than needed about all-the-time....

 

[Newfoundland.Republic]

If you haven't already done so, verify that the RAM is on Supermicro's approved list.

 

[ornias]

If you haven't already done so, verify that the RAM is on Supermicro's approved list.

Not to needlessly bash you, but a QVL is not an "approved" list but rather a "We have tested this, other might work but we cant give guarentees because we didn't test it"-list.

A bit like FreeNAS advices people to use certain NIC because they are tested and known to be working, while others "might work"...

(might be a language barrier thing here though ;) )

*edit*
In the age of DDR4 most ram is pretty similair, and there isn't that much logic in it.
However DDR3 and ECC might complicate stuff.

 

[TranceKat]

LSI SAS9200-8i IBM 46C8937 9200-8i IT for 30 bucks? Wow, you must live in the USA :p
Config is nice, ZFS wise, should've give much of a problem...

That being said:

Arctic Freezer 12	You should be able to get a noctua for that price, for ex. the NH-U12A
Seasonic Focus GX-550	For the same money there is the: Cooler Master V Series V550 Which is one of the best PSU's out there with top-of-class idle efficency
Pure Wings 2	Medium-class fans, not great, not good... but quite a high pricepoint imho

Rest is perfectly fine! :)




Disk overheats are pretty rare with such a (relatively!) low number of disks... Not saying it wouldn't happen, but i've run similar cases with a decent number of known hot-head toshiba disks without any problem temperature wise. (even when stressing all disks with transfers for 24 hours)

I am indeed in the USA. Pennsylvania in fact. I assume $30 is a good price for that card?

For the fan.. I actually need 2 fans since it's a 2 CPU board so that price above is for 2 CPU fans. Regardless, I had to scrap that idea since the board has narrow ILMs so I had to go with a SuperMicro pair of CPU Fans for quite a bit more $ ($45/each).

Likewise, the PSU supports 2 EPS for the 2 CPUs, that's why I went with that selection. I looked at the cool master V Series 550 and it looks great, but I think it only supports 1 EPS from what I saw.

I'm very open to better fans. I assumed Pure Wings were good, but I based that on minimal reading.

Thanks for the good feedback!

 

[TranceKat]

Certainly looks OK.

You may want to look into the PID fan control scripts for it as this will help to keep the disks at a good temperature with quiet fan operation when possible.

Great advice!! Do I run those/that script in any linux shell?

 

[TranceKat]

So it's been a long trek, but I have my system up and running!

I have a VM in ESXi with FreeNAS and it looks to be working very well. I have 16 GB RAM and 2 CPUs dedicated to that VM. There is nothing running on it other than file storage for family photos/videos, and our Movie collection. I see that memory is maxed out all the time; do I need to bump it up to 32Gig, even though FreeNAS is hardly used for anything other than storing long term?

 

[pschatz100]

FreeNAS always allocates as much memory as possible in order to make certain memory resources are available, but it may not actually be using all the allocated memory. The easiest way to check for this is to look at Swap Utilitzation. Swap is extra virtual memory space allocated on disk as a backup if the system runs out of RAM. If Swap utilization is zero, then you have enough RAM. If the system uses a small amount of swap from time to time, then you are probably still OK. If Swap is being used consistently, then you should add more memory.