Asrock C2750D4i vs X10SL7-F Sata Ports

[brianmills]

I'm looking at building a new freenas platform. I've been using freenas on a Non ECC RAM Asrock MB for 12-18 months and its been great. No issues. This was setup on existing left over hardware.

I've since read the hardware recommendations from Cyberjock. I am torn between the C2750D4i and the Supermicro X10SL7-F. My last build didn't use ECC, this one will.

I intend to use it for:

• SMB file shares
• NFS file shares
• AFP time machine backup
• And a Jail for Owncloud

I'm also helping a mate build one to match that he also wants to use as a mail server and gitlab server using Jails as he only wants to run one server. The use for me is lite in both cases, max 5 or 6 family members but not all at the same time.

Finally I am looking at upgrading a small business (church) office to use a similar spec NAS to upgrade from their small 4 bay ATOM QNAP Nas which is constant maintenance for me (thus my thinking of upgrading it). The QNAP is working but I'm sick of the maintenance and headaches. The QNAP also isn't doing any timemachine backups at this stage.

I intend to use 5 x 4TB WD Red Drives in each for the main ZFS data pool.
I also intend to put a mirror of SSD's in for any jail use, or for my house Virtual machine storage use.
And I was going to use a SSD or DOM for install (I have an old 64GB ssd which wasn't used much).
I intended to put 2 x 8GB ECC Ram in the machine (to allow for a later upgrade to 32GB if desired.

My I have a couple of concerns/questions.

1. Are the Marvel Sata controllers a bad idea to use? I have seen it referenced that some people have had issues, but I cant find any detail on what the issues were.
2. Do you think the CPU will handle 3 jails with owncloud/gitlab/postfix+roundcube or should I be looking at a MB like the X10SL7-F with a higher speed Xeon CPU?
3. In a small office environment where the number of users is higher, (but jail use would be limited to 1-2) is there any concern about the number of users that it could support? The office has up to 10-12 people in it, but not working the NAS hard.

 

[marbus90]

The ASRock C2750D4I and C2550D4I have 6x Intel SATA ports and 6x Marvell. The Marvell ports are currently slow to unstable to the point of pool unavailability. Our recommendations for >6 SATA Ports are the Supermicro X10SL7-F and the ASRock E3C224D4I-14S.

The more jails and users are being added, the more RAM should be added. Altough for 10 Users and maybe 2 jails 16GB should suffice. CPU wise it depends on the jail workload - think of a jail as a FreeBSD container with low overhead.

As for boot, FreeNAS supports bootmirrors now. It would probably be preferable over a single bootdevice in remote locations, altough you can handle any maintenance and even reinstalling the system remotely via IPMI (mounting ISOs as CD drives OS independently, remote KVM) if you have VPN access.

If you were to use 2x USB sticks for FreeNAS Boot plus a single SSD for jails which is backed up to the main 5x4TB raidz2 pool via ZFS replication, you may be fine with a more basic mobo like the X10SL*-F series, alternatively ASRock E3C224D4I or MT-C224 in ITX form factor. In some cases, if the jail dataset is small enough and read intensive, you may find that you don't need a SSD for that altogether since ZFS caches disk contents (including jail data) in RAM. The cache has an upper limit of total RAM *0.75 = 12GB in your case. Depending on how the jails write to disk (sync or async writes, the explanation applying to the latter), you'll find that even the write performance is acceptable as a small amount of writes is cached in RAM as well.

 

[brianmills]

Thanks for that. Is the marvel issue a freebsd support issue do you think? (In which case it may be sorted in future releases so I could take a gamble if I only want to use 6 SATA ports now).

Take your point about dual boot. I'm happy to reinstall if the boot device dies, that doesn't bother me that much, I always take a config backup when I make any changes, so it should just be a matter of plugin a new device for a new install and restore config. And I do have VPN access.

Sounds like if I want more than 6 drives I need to go the Xeon with either the supermicro or Asus Board you suggested. The Asus looks like a really good option.
I actually don't know much about SAS so correct me if I'm wrong:
I assume I can use SAS to SATA cables for all 3 mini SAS connections and use all to SATA drives?

Other than the CPU, it looks to be a pretty similar board in terms of functional features (IPM, dual Gig Ethernet, lots of SATA, 4 ECC RAM slots). And will work out not much more cost wise at a quick Google price check if I can find it in Australia).

 

[marbus90]

On the E3C224D4I-14S there's 8x SAS in 2x SFF-8087 and 4x Intel SATA via another SFF-8087. Breakout cables to 4 SATA would work nicely there and are already included.

You'll probably have more luck with the X10SL7-F in Australia.

 

[jgreco]

Thanks for that. Is the marvel issue a freebsd support issue do you think? (In which case it may be sorted in future releases so I could take a gamble if I only want to use 6 SATA ports now).

My recollection is that Marvell doesn't provide documentation for their chipset so the driver is a best-effort sort of thing. Writing drivers through reverse-engineering and/or experimentation is pretty hard, so it might be a good idea to consider these ports as dubious at best.

 

[Ericloewe]

There are two problems with Marvell controllers:

• The 6Gb/s stuff is often slower than Intel 3Gb/s SATA, with the best available drivers (Windows).
• Their driver support for FreeBSD is somewhere between nonexistent and crummy.

 

[brianmills]

Thanks for the clarity on Marvel ports. I'll be ruling them out from use.

I might have to look for a different case, I was trying to stick to the Silverstone DS380, and use the X10SL7-F motherboard then. Its more expensive, but it has all the right features.

The Sharkoon T9 Value case in your sig Ericloewe actually looks good with the ability to use drive cages in it.

 

[Ericloewe]

The X10 boards won't fit in a DS380. It only takes miniITX.

My setup is probably the closest you can get to a neat consumer NAS-style chassis (meaning hot swap bays) without some sort of major compromise.

An alternative is the Lian-Li PC-Q26, which holds up to 10 drives and can take an ASRock E3C224D4I-14S.