Assistance selecting a Supermicro Logic Board

[Al Slitter]

I am asking users here to give me their thoughts on what Supermicro motherboard to select as an upgrade on my existing NAS server.

When I built my server I made a mistake and went with non ECC ram and that was a error. I have not had any problems with my present configuration but I should have done this right the first time.

What I have:
I have a Celeron G3240 CPU
ASRock Anniversary motherboard (Micro AT)
16GB's of none ECC memory
3- 2TB SATA WD Red hard drives
A Silverstone mini Tower case
1- Cool Master Jetflo 120 Static Pressure fan (Placed directly in front of the hard drives)
1-90mm case fan for exhaust
1- 500 Watt Bronze power supply
1- 16GB Kingston memory stick for booting the server.

At present time I am running FreeNas 9.10 with the drives in a Raid Z configuration and do not have any Jails
running. The hard drives thus give me slightly less than 4TB's and of the I am only using about 1 TB.
Yes this is a very simple and basic NAS set up.

OK, moving to my upgrade.
I am looking to replace the motherboard and memory, I would like to keep the CPU as it is working very well and is running under a very low load. As a result I will buy shortly a new Supermicro logic board and a set of 2-8GB ECC Dims. The motherboards I am considering is as follows:

X10SLM-F-O
X10SLM+-F
X10SLH-F-O

While pricing is important I want to future proof the purchase somewhat, so having a minimum of 4 Sata-3 ports is a minimum. My case might be able to support a uATX motherboard but some checking would need to be done. I do not see me going for more than 4 hard drives in the future and if a change in hard drives might be required I might then go to a Mirrored environment with very large SATA drives.

Thoughts please?

 

[DrKK]

I think any of those motherboards are great. They are, essentially, our #1 recommendation for small home FreeNASes. The G3240 will run like a fucking boss in any of those. I think that you can go with whatever of those three is cheapest to you in Thailand---the functional difference in a FreeNAS are negligible.

Also, I wouldn't worry about "future proofing" vis-a-vis the SATA ports. You can't actually get much use, at all, out of SATA-3 ports, when you're talking about an array of spinning disks.

 

[Al Slitter]

Thank you DrKK, as always your advise is much appreciated.
The item I was leaning to was the X10SLM-F-O due to pricing.
This board here in Thailand costs me twice as much as it would in the US, as a result
I have a friend heading back to the US and will have the board sent to him along with the 16GB of
ECC memory. When he returns I will put it all together and see how that goes.

A question or two please:
When I swap out the motherboard and memory I believe that this will have little impact on my RAIDZ configuration
as I had heard that ZFS is independent from the hardware used, is that the case?

Second question, as my drives fill up with data I will be forced to upgrade the size of the drives however with let us say 4TB drives the re-silver time
can be lengthy thus going to RAIDZ2 does provide for extra security. However with the capacities of hard drives increasing and and pricing declining
would it not make sense to go to two large drives and use mirroring. The copy/write function is much faster that the re-silvering process and one is not
hampered by a lengthy recovery.

Thank you in advance.

 

[DrKK]

When I swap out the motherboard and memory I believe that this will have little impact on my RAIDZ configuration
as I had heard that ZFS is independent from the hardware used, is that the case?

Yes. That's the case. Your pool is an independent entity from the operating system. You can take that pool, and bring it to any FreeNAS (assuming equal, or greater, ZFS version, of course) without any trouble. One you have the new system configured as per your taste, simply import the pool.

Second question, as my drives fill up with data I will be forced to upgrade the size of the drives however with let us say 4TB drives the re-silver time
can be lengthy thus going to RAIDZ2 does provide for extra security. However with the capacities of hard drives increasing and and pricing declining
would it not make sense to go to two large drives and use mirroring. The copy/write function is much faster that the re-silvering process and one is not
hampered by a lengthy recovery.

"Make sense" in what way? In terms of not losing your data in the event of a lengthy resilver?

 

[Al Slitter]

Based on several videos that I have watched it was mentioned that doing a RaidZ (Raid 5) re-silver of a VDEV which contains 2GB drives could take up to one week.
With 4GB drives who knows????
The longer the resilver process the greater the risk of a second failure plus the slow down of the server while in the reselver process. I am a fair ways from being there, as I am
at only 25% of my allocated storage space but one needs to think forward. If I lost a drive I would normally replace it with a 4GB WD Red and continue on with RaidZ using only half of the drive.
However it might be best to go with 2-8GB WD Hard drives and mirror them.

Here is a video link that caused me to think about that!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxkXNZlJDJc&index=1&list=LLLizldiCiKzaiNnjOoqzEXA

Thanks again!

 

[danb35]

Is that video suggesting that resilvering a single 2 TB (and please, TB, not GB) disk takes up to a week? That's simply not true on anything approaching recommended hardware. The last disk I resilvered was 3 TB, and the time was on the order of several hours, not multiple days.

 

[Al Slitter]

Thank you so much for the information.
Yes, in the video he stated that to restore of a 2TB hard drive could/would take up to one week.
As I have not had to do a re-silver in the past I am left only with what others have to say.
I believe the process is dependent on the amountt of data to restore but hours is hardly one week!

Thanks again.

 

[danb35]

I believe the process is dependent on the amountt of data

That's correct. One of the advantages of ZFS over traditional RAID is that ZFS knows which blocks are used and which aren't, and therefore only needs to resilver the used blocks. My pool was sitting at around 80% full when I replaced that device. I can't imagine why that video would say it could take days, unless the context was expanding a pool by replacing disks one at a time with larger ones.

 

[Al Slitter]

That's correct. One of the advantages of ZFS over traditional RAID is that ZFS knows which blocks are used and which aren't, and therefore only needs to resilver the used blocks. My pool was sitting at around 80% full when I replaced that device. I can't imagine why that video would say it could take days, unless the context was expanding a pool by replacing disks one at a time with larger ones.

Thank you for clarifying this issue with a real world example, I can now plan out what to do when a hard drive failure comes!