BUILD Allround-NAS with 2 bays (future SSD-upgrade)

[Bl4ckShadow]

Hey,

besides my NAS, I also want to build a second one for my brother who is also in need for network storage.
Now, we have planned only to use two drives (2x 4TB), as ~3,5TB are sufficient for him.

First of all: In terms of redundancy and data integrity, is it save to go with this in a RAID 1 configuration?
Especially as I've read many critical voices for example in terms of RAID5 - configs nowadays. Is the data save in case of a drive failure with consumer-grade hard-drives or do I need to worry and overthink the system?

The NAS will be used as a target for backups of 2-3 clients, as a music-, picture and (smaller) video-server etc., so your typical private household workload.
As of now, we've chosen the following components; I'd be looking forward if some experienced FreeNAS-guys looked over it and mentioned if there is anything wrong.

* HDDs: 2x WD40EFRX (4TB WD Red's)
* Mainboard with CPU: Asrock C2550D4I (Intel 4 core avoton)
* RAM: 8GB Kingston ValueRAM Single Rank DDR3-1600 regECC CL11 single module
* PSU: 450 watts Seasonic G-Series modular 80+ Gold (I struggle to find <400 watts PSUs with proper efficieny and cable-management...)
* Case: Lian-Li Q11B

What is the difference between ECC and (registered) regECC - RAM? What to choose?
In the future (~2 yrs), we would like to upgrade the NAS to a SSD-only based solution. As the board has only 2 Intel Sata-6 ports, two SSDs - also in RAID1 - are what we consider now. Is the CPU sufficient for this task? Especially with a 10Gbit/s - NIC and - environment.


I'd appreciate some words of you advanced builders out there. Thank you for any advice in advance! :)

Regards,
Patrick

 

[anodos]

Hey,
What is the difference between ECC and (registered) regECC - RAM? What to choose?

That's easy. You choose the one that works in your system. You want an 8GB ECC UDIMM.

 

[MrToddsFriends]

Talking about mirrors vs. RaidZ1/RaidZ2: Please allow me to dig out a blog posting that has been discussed several times here in the forum:

http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zfs-you-should-use-mirror-vdevs-not-raidz/

One of the main pro-mirror arguments of the author is that resilvering of a mirror is much faster than resilvering a parity array (like the RaidZ1/RaidZ2 levels) and so the probability of a disk failure during the rebuild is much lower. Following this argument I won't argue against a mirror here (but note that most of those discussions ware carried out having mechanical HDDs in mind and not SSDs).

The next thing to consider is expandability: Consider your brother wants to add further disks (a second mirror for example) or he wants to add a (ZFS-)replication of his most important datasets to an extra pool inside his NAS. A six bay case like the Node 304 might be simply more useful.

http://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/node-series/node-304-black

I can't say anything about combining Avoton, 10G Ethernet and SSD-only. 10G switches are too expensive, too noisy and consume too much power to be interesting for me at home right now.

 

[Bl4ckShadow]

Thanks for your replies. :) Last weekend I had finally the time to get a bit deeper into the whole thing.
First of all I swapped the Asrock C2550D4I with the equivalent Supermicro board but when I already wanted to buy it, I realized I could actually get way more for the money.

The Supermicro A1SAI-2550F is about 300,- over here. Thats quite a lot imo, for only getting a processing score of rouhly 2300 (PassMark).
Wouldn't I be better of getting an Intel i3 4170 (110,-) with a PassMark score of ~5200, together with for exmaple a Supermicro X10SLH-F (230,-) (nice Intel C226 chipset) and a sufficient cooler (20,-).
That would translate into ~ 2,3x the performance for only 60,- more.

Are there any drawbacks of this config compared to the original one mentioned earlier in the thread?

The only downsides I can see right now are:
- bigger motherboard (microATX vs Mini ITX) -> I don't care
- CPU under load might draw a bite more power -> no problem regarding the fact that idle power draw is still very low on both
- only 32GB instead of 64GB of RAM supported -> 32GB enough for my needs

But on the plus side:
+ more than double the performance
+ ECC as well
+ IPMI as well
+ 6 instead of only 2 SATA6 ports (future SSD upgrade)
+ regular-sized DIMMs

Am I forgetting anything here or is this combo really quite superior? Are there better motherboard choices? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. :)

Regards

 

[religiouslyconfused]

Or you could go Skylake and get 64GB of ram. Supermicro skylake boards have 6 to 8 SATA3 6.0Gbps ports.

 

[JDCynical]

Or you could go Skylake and get 64GB of ram. Supermicro skylake boards have 6 to 8 SATA3 6.0Gbps ports.

Except skylake is still a bit... 'finicky' under FreeBSD/FreeNAS at this time, with the two main things that come to mind are the USB XHCI and network chipset support (or lack thereof) on select boards.

If one is aware of the 'gotchas' and workarounds, Skylake appears to be the better long term choice IMO, but if not having to 'fiddle' with things is of priority, the previous gen kit is the better option.

 

[Bl4ckShadow]

OK, indeed - I did my homework and found out that Skylake i3's seem to be the better alternative.

What exactly are the issues with Skylake in FreeNAS? Could you forward me some information about the problems you mentioned and on how to solve them?

Right now I am favoring the i3 6100 in combination with the Supermicro X11SSL-F motherboard, which should cover all I need right now and has 6 SATA3-ports. I think it's the closest skylake-equivalent to my Haswell-choice. http://www.supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/Xeon/C236_C232/X11SSL-F.cfm
Is there also the issue with the network chipset support and the USB host controller on this board? To be honest I have no idea on how to fiddle with this, but I am willing to as I plan to run this config at least for the next 5 years. So buying an already outdated platform right now isn't the best idea IMHO.

Regards and thanks again for all the help. Appreciate it :)

 

[Mirfster]

Some threads on the matter:

So, you've decided to buy a Supermicro X11 board...
My Dream System (I think)
Skylake, xHCI and UPS: compatibility on FreeNAS 9.3?

Now, we have planned only to use two drives (2x 4TB), as ~3,5TB are sufficient for him.

If the drives are mirrored, then you have some redundancy; at the cost of 1/2 the space. If you are striping them and one dies, so does the entire pool and all the data... Read CyberJock's "Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC for noobs!" linked in my sig, it will help inform you.

 

[SweetAndLow]

You might get the best bang for your buck by using a lenovo ts140 or Dell t20. They meet your needs it sounds like, are cheap and easy.

 

[Bl4ckShadow]

OK, thanks for all your replies so far. I really think we'll wait till FreeNAS v.10 is ready and out of alpha. As I've read, the corresponding functionalities and fixes should be implemented there.
Hopefully, it doesn't take too long; I think many of us are waiting for Skylake-support. :)

 

[Bl4ckShadow]

Hey,

I'll just post under my original thread rather than opening a new one.

Are there any updates regarding the support of Skylake CPUs in the lates FreeNAS v9.10 Stable (FreeNAS v10 still seems to take quite a while until official out-of-alpha release) in terms of general problems and the issues mentioned in the posts above?

Thanks :)

 

[Mirfster]

If I recall correctly, there are quite a few people successfully running Skylake on 9.10...

 

[Nick2253]

As far as supported hardware, both 9.10 and 10 run over FreeBSD 10, so you shouldn't see any hardware compatibility problems between them.

 

[Bl4ckShadow]

OK, thanks a lot for the input! :)

I am about to order all the stuff - one question I have left over regarding the CPU:
Is the i3-6300 woth the extra +25$ over the i3-6100 for the additional 1MB of cache (4MB instead of 3MB)? (also has +0,1HGz frequency, which is more or less irrelevant)

 

[SweetAndLow]

Depends on what you want to use it for. Probably not though.

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