BUILD Backup setup

[hydra1981]

Hi everyone,

I am putting together a FreeNAS set-up to replace my admittedly very solid ReadyNAS units (NVX and Ultra 4 Plus). This is not only for modernisation but also for the enjoyment of it. I have already purchased the following

2 x Ablecom CS-M50 chassis
1 x Supermicro A1SRI-2758F
2 x 8 GB ECC modules for the A1SRI from Crucial

Not sure about the disks yet, I might use 4 x 1 TB WD Red that I already have unless they sell with the ReadyNAS units first. Otherwise I will aim for 4 x 2 TB WD Red/Green/Blue etc, not very important at this stage. The Supermicro was working out cheaper than an ASRock 1150 mini ITX plus CPU/heatsinks or the ASRock Avoton models. ECC memory was the key factor in the decision regarding the board. I didn't manage to make any sense of the information out there regarding potential AMD mini-ITX implemenations so I decided to stick with Intel for at least one of the two units.

You can see that I am focusing on one of the units first. The set-up I am aiming for is 1 unit as the core unit and the second one as a backup through FreeNAS high availability (HAST, real time block replication). The configuration of the first unit is working out quite a bit more expensive than I was originally aiming for given that these are units that will be used at home. This is however fine. For the second unit that will be doing nothing 99.99% of the time (other than the block replication) I feel it might be a bit of an overkill to replicate the Supermicro based setup.

Are there any rock-bottom price wise recommendations regarding hardware? Still mini-ITX (to fit the Ablecom) and ECC. Suggestions for older Intel based boards or AMD implementations are welcomed. Please keep it specific if possible (mini-ITX, ECC).

Many thanks for your help!

 

[hydra1981]

No mini-ITX cheap AMD solutions then? :-(

 

[gpsguy]

I think the Supermicro and Asrock boards are your only choices. Turn back the clock a year and you could have picked up a HP N54L (not mini-ITX, but a "Microserver" using an AMD CPU).

 

[hydra1981]

Yeah, I somehow did not go for the HP solution, I wanted something a bit more bespoke. The other kit that I've got is also Supermicro so I'll probably skip the ASRock and go for a Supermicro A1SRI-2550 instead. Although the ASRock allows for CPU upgrades for future-proofing I'll probably stick with the SM solution as a slightly cheaper alternative. Or not... decisions...

 

[hydra1981]

I ended up building two of these bad boys one with an ASRock E3C226D2I, 8GB, a Pentium G3220 and 4 x 1TB WD Red as the backup and one with a Supermicro A1SAi-2550F with 8GB and 4 x 2TB WD Red as the main unit. Memory will get upgraded at some point in the future. These will replace the Netgear ReadyNAS NVX and ReadyNAS Ultra 4 Plus (both with 4GB of RAM). I am not sure if I will see any benefit to be honest since I believe that the Netgears are excellent units with very decent performance but it has been an enjoyable experience so far. Unfortunately the Supermicro A1SRi-2758F board I bought originally was dead on arrival, either bricked or dead CPU because IPMI is working fine. Weird. Looking forward into setting up live replication with FreeNAS, iSCSI share to Citrix XenServer etc.