7 years down the line, where do I go now? (New Build)

[british]

Hi forums, I hope everyone is well in these difficult times. So, I've got the following setup which has served me amazingly now for now over 7 years:

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU
Motherboard: Gigabit H61M-D2-B3
Memory: 16GB (non ECC)
HBA: (LSI) SAS2008

8 x 3TB WD RED (RAIDz2) (These are the original drives when I setup the box)
2 x 10TB WD GOLD (Mirror) (These were added in Q4 2017)

1 x 60GB OS SSD Kingston.

And a Fractal Designs case, can't remember which one it is.

I'm basically at the point where my mirror is near maxed, as is my z2.

I do use Bhyve for a VM or two, run about 5 x jails (Plex, NGINX, etc). I'm thinking I would like to go 32GB of memory, and ECC this time for sure.

I'm torn between buying 8 x WD (Red or Gold?) 8TB drives, or perhaps even buying 6 x 10 WD Gold and dropping the mirror and building a 8 x 10TB RAIDz2. Or should I buy large drives say 16TB and drop to say 4 of them?

Basically I'm open to anything within reason. Cost wise, happy to invest max another 2500€.

Box is on 24/7/365 FWIW.

Very best wishes, and thanks in advance.

 

[Yorick]

I’d go for a supermicro board. An x11scl-f with i3-9300f or, if you want more onboard sata as well as an iGPU for Plex, then a x11sch-f with an i3-9300. You can also go for xeon e-21xx or e-22xx with this, again the sch-f if you want to use an iGPU. Caveat that you’ll want to verify which iGPU generations FreeBSD 13.1 supports now.

And ddr4 ECC udimm from the supermicro estore. Start with 32 and one dimm, that gives you room for growth.

I haven’t looked at the x12 and e-23xx xeons, that’s more a cost consideration than anything else. Whatever is affordable. They’ll all perform the same within margin.

For drives you have lots of options, just avoid SMR.

I’m assuming the mirror handles about the same data as the z2 and there are no performance issues. If you are looking at serving data to something like an esxi then you’d want a mirror pool with more spindles and smaller drives.

As for capacity, it depends on what you think your needs are. I have 8x8TB and I cannot think of how I’ll fill it. Maybe I will eventually but it’ll last for years and years. Your situation may differ.

6x10 gives you 40 (minus ZFS overhead) and the need to replace 6 drives to upgrade the capacity of the main pool.

8x8 is 48, but now you need to replace 8 drives to upgrade pool capacity. 6x12 gets you the same capacity.

To some extent you can also punt the decision: Do 6x10 or 6x12 now, wherever the price sweet spot is, and then down the road you can decide to either replace all drives with much larger capacity ones or add a drive, since raidz expansion seems like a thing that’ll be here 2024.

 

[british]

Hey @Yorick thank you for the reply! I've been a bit lazy, and so far the refresh has only been to move to 8 x 10TB WD Gold's, and a new PSU (due to old one burning out). I'll take a look at the parts you're recommending.

Best wishes!