About 2-3 years ago, when we moved to our new house, I decided to redo the house network infrastructure, using commercial components and techniques rather than the typical home-oriented stuff. As part of that redesign, I was going to build a FreeNAS system to act as the main house data store. For various reasons, the project got delayed until now.
I've read what I could find on this forum and other places, and I think I have a general idea of what to do, but would like both a sanity check on the hardware, and answers to some case-specific questions that I've not been able to figure out.
Part of the problem is that I don't have a particularily good idea of what I need. The idea of this build is to provide mass storage for the house, but I don't really know how much, so I've been speccing more along the lines of "lowest cost per TB" then to a specific target. I know I intend to use this for storing music (we have about 3-400 CDs that we are planning on having ripped to MP3 or perhaps FLAC) to be accessed via Plex or similar system. I also plan to dump various family photos there, but we are talking 10s-100s of MBs here, not huge amounts. Beyond that, I don't know. Might store a bit of video, some home recordings, archives of some YouTube stuff I've recorded, but not planning on ripping hundreds of DVDs/BDs or anything like that. Maybe a few hundred GBs, at a guess, of that.
I'm not planning on running jails on this build, since I already have an ESXi server that I can spin up VMs or Docker containers on. So Plex or whatever would live there. I don't plan to store the VMs on the NAS either - the ESXi server has adequate storage for the various applications (all on mirrored SSDs), it's just the data that needs to live elsewhere.
There are only 3 human beings living in the house, so we don't need a whole lot of concurrent connections to be supported...
When I first started to plan this built, I decided on the following hardware:
Case: Supermicro 825TQ-R700LPB
MB: Supermicro X10SL7-F
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231v3
RAM: 32GB of Samsung ram from the MB vendor list
CPU Cooler: SNK-P0046P - this is the Supermicro recomended passive cooler for this MB/CPU
Boot Device: Supermicro SSD-DM064-PHI SATA DOM, 64GB
Data Drives: TBD, probably WD Red 8TB, maybe 8 of them
I already own the case, and intend to use it, as I want this rack mounted and it's quite a nice case - 8 hot swap 3.5" bays, dual hot-swappable PSUs, and space for 2 more fixed drives. The rest of the hardware, except the data drives, is identical to what is in my ESXi server, so I at least have some familiarity with the hardware, though I'm far from an expert.
So the first question is: Does this still makes sense today for what I want to do? Should I move up to the X11 MBs, or something even newer, for the ability to get more RAM and newer, faster CPUs and chipsets? The costs for X11 seem about the same (the X10 has actually gone up in price since I specced this originally...), but I don't think I actually need that? If going to X11 makes sense, which CPU would you recommend?
Second, I went with the X10SL7-F because of the built-in hardware RAID controller. Now for FreeNAS I'd have to reflash that, which seems a bit of a PITA? However, when I've looked at the other X10 and X11 MBs in the guides posted in the Resources section, it appears that only X10SL7-F and X11SSH-CTF (also with RAID controller) can support 8 data drives plus 1-2 boot drives. Am I understanding that correct? I'd love to go with the cheaper and less complicated to use MBs that don't have the RAID controllers, but I probably want the ability to have 8 HDDs... If there's another board in those families that can do this, please let me know.
Third, what drive topology should I be using? It seems that with drives in the 8TB range (which seem to currently be the sweet spot for cost per TB) I'd want double redundancy, so we are talking RAIDZ2. OTOH, I've seen a number of folks recommend just using mirroring for this type of application, as it's easier to deal with, more flexible, and easier to expand. But then I'd need to have 3 drives for each 1 drive's worth of data, right? Seems very inefficient, 9 drives (the largest divisible-by-three number I can squeeze into this case) would get me 3 drive's worth of data? Is this a better approach or should I just go with RAIDZ2? And assuming RAIDZ2, what's the best arrangement? Dumping 8 drives into a single RAIDZ2 vdev seems the most space efficient, but should I be considering some other arrangement?
Finally, I found a calculator on this forum (https://www.ixsystems.com/community...-comparison-spreadsheet-to-find-best-tib.116/) that suggests that 8*8TB drives in a RAIDZ2 arrangement gives 34.37TB usable space. I thought RAIDZ2 used 2 drives for redundancy, thus 8*8TB drives should give 48TB (6*8) of usable space? What am I missing?
Any advice will be much appreciated.
I've read what I could find on this forum and other places, and I think I have a general idea of what to do, but would like both a sanity check on the hardware, and answers to some case-specific questions that I've not been able to figure out.
Part of the problem is that I don't have a particularily good idea of what I need. The idea of this build is to provide mass storage for the house, but I don't really know how much, so I've been speccing more along the lines of "lowest cost per TB" then to a specific target. I know I intend to use this for storing music (we have about 3-400 CDs that we are planning on having ripped to MP3 or perhaps FLAC) to be accessed via Plex or similar system. I also plan to dump various family photos there, but we are talking 10s-100s of MBs here, not huge amounts. Beyond that, I don't know. Might store a bit of video, some home recordings, archives of some YouTube stuff I've recorded, but not planning on ripping hundreds of DVDs/BDs or anything like that. Maybe a few hundred GBs, at a guess, of that.
I'm not planning on running jails on this build, since I already have an ESXi server that I can spin up VMs or Docker containers on. So Plex or whatever would live there. I don't plan to store the VMs on the NAS either - the ESXi server has adequate storage for the various applications (all on mirrored SSDs), it's just the data that needs to live elsewhere.
There are only 3 human beings living in the house, so we don't need a whole lot of concurrent connections to be supported...
When I first started to plan this built, I decided on the following hardware:
Case: Supermicro 825TQ-R700LPB
MB: Supermicro X10SL7-F
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231v3
RAM: 32GB of Samsung ram from the MB vendor list
CPU Cooler: SNK-P0046P - this is the Supermicro recomended passive cooler for this MB/CPU
Boot Device: Supermicro SSD-DM064-PHI SATA DOM, 64GB
Data Drives: TBD, probably WD Red 8TB, maybe 8 of them
I already own the case, and intend to use it, as I want this rack mounted and it's quite a nice case - 8 hot swap 3.5" bays, dual hot-swappable PSUs, and space for 2 more fixed drives. The rest of the hardware, except the data drives, is identical to what is in my ESXi server, so I at least have some familiarity with the hardware, though I'm far from an expert.
So the first question is: Does this still makes sense today for what I want to do? Should I move up to the X11 MBs, or something even newer, for the ability to get more RAM and newer, faster CPUs and chipsets? The costs for X11 seem about the same (the X10 has actually gone up in price since I specced this originally...), but I don't think I actually need that? If going to X11 makes sense, which CPU would you recommend?
Second, I went with the X10SL7-F because of the built-in hardware RAID controller. Now for FreeNAS I'd have to reflash that, which seems a bit of a PITA? However, when I've looked at the other X10 and X11 MBs in the guides posted in the Resources section, it appears that only X10SL7-F and X11SSH-CTF (also with RAID controller) can support 8 data drives plus 1-2 boot drives. Am I understanding that correct? I'd love to go with the cheaper and less complicated to use MBs that don't have the RAID controllers, but I probably want the ability to have 8 HDDs... If there's another board in those families that can do this, please let me know.
Third, what drive topology should I be using? It seems that with drives in the 8TB range (which seem to currently be the sweet spot for cost per TB) I'd want double redundancy, so we are talking RAIDZ2. OTOH, I've seen a number of folks recommend just using mirroring for this type of application, as it's easier to deal with, more flexible, and easier to expand. But then I'd need to have 3 drives for each 1 drive's worth of data, right? Seems very inefficient, 9 drives (the largest divisible-by-three number I can squeeze into this case) would get me 3 drive's worth of data? Is this a better approach or should I just go with RAIDZ2? And assuming RAIDZ2, what's the best arrangement? Dumping 8 drives into a single RAIDZ2 vdev seems the most space efficient, but should I be considering some other arrangement?
Finally, I found a calculator on this forum (https://www.ixsystems.com/community...-comparison-spreadsheet-to-find-best-tib.116/) that suggests that 8*8TB drives in a RAIDZ2 arrangement gives 34.37TB usable space. I thought RAIDZ2 used 2 drives for redundancy, thus 8*8TB drives should give 48TB (6*8) of usable space? What am I missing?
Any advice will be much appreciated.
