BUILD All 2.5" drives viable? New Storageserver

[niaaard?]

Hello,


I want to build a new (FreeNAS) Server, but I'm not sure if my plans are sane.

Things I already have and COULD use for that NAS:


5x WD Velociraptor 1TB 2.5"
1x HGST Ultrastar 7K4000
1x Samsung 840PRO 128GB
1x Supermicro X10SAT (a workstation mainboard WITHOUT IPMI)
4x RAM ECC 8GB (100% working in X10SAT atm)
1x Haswell Refresh Xeon
1x LSI 9211-8IT

Storage configuration:
2x1TB mirror
3x1TB raidz1
1x4TB jbod



At the moment I run a AMD Bulldozer with ECC as server. Besides that its in a (back than not so) crappy Chenbro 4U case. The big 4TB drive is not fully utilized, only 1,5TB static atm. But its 3,5" and for me not hotswappable atm, as I have Cremax 4x2.5" in 1x5.25" cases for my 2.5" drives.
After I read the stickies in this forum (yes I did :)) I don't trust this machine anymore.

Besides that I also want to upgrade the storage volume a little bit, so i looked out for big server grade harddisks. I only found Seagate Enterprise Capacity 2.5 2TB drives (SATA or SAS availible). I would buy two of those. As I have the choice (new chassis can carry SAS drives, see later) between SATA and SAS, which should I choose? I want those two new drives to put my (not so important) data from the 4TB drive I meantioned earlier.
The 4TB drive would the come into an external enclosure for backup purposes.

The new chassis I chose after some research would be the Supermicro SC213LT-600LPB http://www.supermicro.nl/products/chassis/2U/213/SC213LT-600LP.cfm

The currently inteded configuration would fill out all of the 8 slots, so upgrades can either be done by swapping old drives with bigger ones or use the 5,25" bay and place another backplane with additional slots there.

So my question is: Should I go for something like that, or should I sell most of my stuff and go for 3,5" technology? I really like my Velociraptors. They are from different workstations I have, but were replaced by SSDs, so I had them to spare.

My storage needs are mostly covered at the moment and also for next year. But i guess in 2y will want more space. Not much, but definiteley more.


In addition to that, I want to use a 10GBaseT connection, as Gigabit LACP doesn't seem to work with NFS or CIFS (I can choose whatever I like to use in my environment).

If u want to know, why i have the workstation mainboard availible: It will be replaced by Haswell-EP.

I hope my story is somewhat interesting and i did not forget something. Don't want to mess it up here right from the beginning. I'm willing to provide all information u need!

 

[marbus90]

Always choose SAS if you have the controller for it and the option for around the same price.

Another chassis option would be the http://www.supermicro.nl/products/chassis/2U/216/SC216BE16-R920LP.cfm the PSUs of which seem to be quieter. Also it comes with 24x2.5" bays which are connected trough an expander with a single SFF-8087 connection. Plus you can get a rear 2x2.5" hotswap bay connecting to the motherboard's onboard SATA to boot FreeNAS from.
Depending on the troughput you want on the 10Gbps connection, you should think of adding more disks anyway. Another idea would be Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000 EA 1TB for "slow" storage plus striped mirrors on the Velociraptors plus the 5th one as spare.

Conclusion: If you want a 10Gbps network connection, I'd rather pick more 2.5" drives instead of larger 3.5" to boost the IOPS and sequential speeds.

 

[niaaard?]

Thank you for your reply.

I already checked some of the other chassis. And the costs explode quite fast. How do u know, that the REDUNDANT and more powerful PSU is more quiet than the sinlge 600W PSU.

Fun fact: I indeed have some 1TB Travelstars flying around! Ofc i could make use of them.

Btw I don't need to use the 10G connection at full throttle, I just want something faster than 1G, because its limiting hard, at least for read speeds.
Writing speeds are somewhat slow until now. I get about 40MB/s synced write.

 

[marbus90]

That's because those 920W PSUs come with the "SuperQuiet" label and are used in workstations too. You wouldn't want screamers under your desk. ;)

I'd only use the Travelstars if they are the EA version for 24/7 operation. You can run into Load Cycle Count issues with the standard 2.5" drives.

40MB/s is quite slow, is your pool quite full? You should set a pool quota of 80% to avoid the feared ZFS fragmentation and capacity-optimized routines.

 

[niaaard?]

The server will be in a dedicated room (aka pantry). However there are a couple of machines in there, and I can hear them through the door. So if its possible, the new machine shouldn't be a "screamer". So I will reconsider my choice and look again through Supermicro's shelf. I hope there are chassis with both, "quiet" label and NOT super overkill wattage... let's see...

I just copied a big file to the "1 drive jbod" and it showed 40MB/s. Don't know if thats really way too slow, but im used to it and i didnt expect much more from sync writes to a single disk. Writes to the other pools may be a bit faster, but then there are only very small files so it takes longer to copy and write them again. A more streamlined configuration for high IOPS would help I guess, but ill wait for my new setup before I change anything in that department. I didn't point that out in a correct way, my apologies.

My travelstars are EA ofc, I only buy "24/7" hard-disks. They only die "sometimes" not "annoyingly often" like the other versions...

 

[joelmusicman]

With your "1 drive JBOD" you're probably limited by the transfer speed of the hard drive itself, not the network. GbE tends to peak at around 100-120MB/s sequential, which happens to be quite similar to the speed of most 3.5" drives. Laptop drives are often quite a bit slower (40MB/s sounds right for a single drive), as not only are the parts smaller, they are optimized for low power consumption, not performance.

I've also been eying the Samsung Spinpoint M9T 2tb drives, but Marbus brings up a good point about the head parking. I wonder if it's possible to mod the firmware...

Anyway, in internet land, we're really not clear on what workload you're planning on using for it. I was looking for faster than GbE for awhile, then I figured out that most of my use is "cold" storage & media serving, and 10Gb would really be a waste of money.

 

[niaaard?]

OFC I know, that a single JBOD drive is a limiting factor. But the performance on the other shares, which are supposed to be faster, weren't that much faster either. Whatever, I wont investigate this issue any further, as I will sell my AMD Workstation working as a server atm. I have mixed feelings about dropping my last AMD machine, but from various standpoints I have no other choice.

And YES I really did an extensive amount of research before making the decision to throw some 10G Cards in my configuration. There really should be a reallife performance gain.

The main question, which was "am stupid to even think about using 2.5inch drives only". And absolutely noone considered that to stupid.

I also got some other useful hints. Thank you for those!