Before I Order, Sanity Check

[Arkhen]

Hi

Selling my Synology DS1815+ (+16GB RAM upgraded) to create myself my first FreeNAS.

Before I place the order on all the parts, I would like to know your opinions on whether if this is going to be a disaster or if it would actually work perfectly.

The system is for Plex true 1080p playback for multiple units at a time (5+), where my current Synology DS1815+ struggles to do 1 at a time with its atom CPU.

CPU - http://ark.intel.com/sv/products/88177/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-1275-v5-8M-Cache-3_60-GHz

Motherboard - I know you guys love Supermicro, but wouldn't this board work fine too? https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/C236A-WORKSTATION.html
If not, then maybe something like this: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C236_C232/X11SSH-F.cfm

RAM - http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/ct2k16g4wfd8213

HDDs - Gonna use my old 4x3TB WD Reds from the current Synology system.

SSD Cache - Also moved from the Synology, a Corsair Force3 120GB

Boot USB - Mainly because I already have this lying around.
http://www.corsair.com/en-us/flash-voyager-usb-3-32gb-short-usb-flashdrives

PSU - http://www.corsair.com/en/rmi-series-rm650i-650-watt-80-plus-gold-certified-fully-modular-psu

UPS - An AEG 500w, only NAS is hooked up to it.

Chassis - An old chassis I have lying around too. When HDD space becomes an issue I'll change to a Fractal something. http://www.coolermaster.com/case/full-tower/haf-x/

I know some of the hardware is a little overkill, but I'm a guy who loves unnecessary headroom! :)
Let me know what you think, and thanks a lot in advance!

/e: typo

 

[TigerXtrm]

1. That MSI motherboard would work, sure. But it has a lot of features on it that you really don't need on a NAS board. I haven't checked the prices but you might be paying for stuff you won't be using. (Maybe) more importantly, some of those extra features you won't be using will still consume power, which is kind of a waste of money at the end of the year. Since a NAS is on 24/7 you'll want to minimize the power consumption as much as you can. Especially as coming from a Synology the leap in power usage will already be fairly significant.

2. The PSU is overkill. This system could easily (very easily) run on a 450W PSU. Save your money unless you have a solid expansion planned in the future that will actually need a 650W PSU. It won't matter much in terms of power consumption if the PSU is 80 Plus Gold, but it will save you a good 30 bucks when ordering the system.

3. FreeNAS recommends running the storage pool in RAIDZ2, which ideally requires 6 disks (2 for parity). Running 4 disks in RAIDZ2 would leave you with only 6TB of available storage and RAIDZ1 is very much not recommended for disks that size.

As an aside, you mentioned you were going to use the old disks from the Synology and put them into the FreeNAS system. Do you have a plan ready for transferring the 9TB worth of data from one to the other? Because it won't be as easy as moving the disks over. All 4 disks will be formatted when creating the pool, so you will have to transfer the data off the Synology, onto a temporary location and then transfer it back onto the FreeNAS. And while the data is between systems it is extremely vulnerable, so you may want to consider if you want to do that. The safest route would be to buy new drives for the FreeNAS system and transfer the data directly from the old system to the new system.

 

[SweetAndLow]

I agree when the comments above and I'll add that you should forget about the ssd cache it will not help for your use case.

 

[Arkhen]

1. That MSI motherboard would work, sure. But it has a lot of features on it that you really don't need on a NAS board. I haven't checked the prices but you might be paying for stuff you won't be using. (Maybe) more importantly, some of those extra features you won't be using will still consume power, which is kind of a waste of money at the end of the year. Since a NAS is on 24/7 you'll want to minimize the power consumption as much as you can. Especially as coming from a Synology the leap in power usage will already be fairly significant.

2. The PSU is overkill. This system could easily (very easily) run on a 450W PSU. Save your money unless you have a solid expansion planned in the future that will actually need a 650W PSU. It won't matter much in terms of power consumption if the PSU is 80 Plus Gold, but it will save you a good 30 bucks when ordering the system.

3. FreeNAS recommends running the storage pool in RAIDZ2, which ideally requires 6 disks (2 for parity). Running 4 disks in RAIDZ2 would leave you with only 6TB of available storage and RAIDZ1 is very much not recommended for disks that size.

As an aside, you mentioned you were going to use the old disks from the Synology and put them into the FreeNAS system. Do you have a plan ready for transferring the 9TB worth of data from one to the other? Because it won't be as easy as moving the disks over. All 4 disks will be formatted when creating the pool, so you will have to transfer the data off the Synology, onto a temporary location and then transfer it back onto the FreeNAS. And while the data is between systems it is extremely vulnerable, so you may want to consider if you want to do that. The safest route would be to buy new drives for the FreeNAS system and transfer the data directly from the old system to the new system.

1. Duly noted. I've also settled with the idea of the SuperMicro board > the MSI board. Dual NIC, IPMI etc. > onboard sound and black pcb shenanigans.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C236_C232/X11SSH-F.cfm

2. I like to have lots of headroom when it comes to PSU, and it's not like bigger PSU means more wall power draw, unless of course the bigger PSU has worse efficiency.
But I will see if I can grab a smaller one, thinking of grabbing a Seasonic instead.

3. I currently only have 5TB of data on my NAS, and it shouldn't be a problem to move it to a secure location while I switch over to the new NAS.
I will be sure to order a couple more reds then, just for the redundancy of RAIDZ2>RAIDZ1 thank you for that heads up!

I agree when the comments above and I'll add that you should forget about the ssd cache it will not help for your use case.

There is 0 gain from having a cache disc SSD?

 

[jgreco]

There'll likely be a slight gain on a properly sized PSU in terms of efficiency. Too big is usually a MUCH better choice than the normal mistake, too small. The larger PSU will probably eat a few extra watts.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/proper-power-supply-sizing-guidance.38811/

Awesome on reconsidering the mainboard choice. You'll end up with a more suitable result.

There's a lot of misinformation out there about how L2ARC works, but basically L2ARC reduces the amount of ARC you have somewhat. If you have a busy pool, like a departmental fileserver, that's smashed all day long, yes, L2ARC is definitely a great thing, because it increases the number of things that a 100% busy pool can be serving simultaneously. However, for most small servers, the idea that it will make you "go fast" is wrong, because usually there's only one or two requests going on, and you're limited on the output side of the NAS by a 1Gbit ethernet. So the pool isn't likely to be the madhouse-busy that'd really benefit from L2ARC, and the difference in sub-ms (L2ARC) or five-ms (fetched from pool) response time won't be noticed by the end user.

 

[Arkhen]

There'll likely be a slight gain on a properly sized PSU in terms of efficiency. Too big is usually a MUCH better choice than the normal mistake, too small. The larger PSU will probably eat a few extra watts.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/proper-power-supply-sizing-guidance.38811/

Awesome on reconsidering the mainboard choice. You'll end up with a more suitable result.

There's a lot of misinformation out there about how L2ARC works, but basically L2ARC reduces the amount of ARC you have somewhat. If you have a busy pool, like a departmental fileserver, that's smashed all day long, yes, L2ARC is definitely a great thing, because it increases the number of things that a 100% busy pool can be serving simultaneously. However, for most small servers, the idea that it will make you "go fast" is wrong, because usually there's only one or two requests going on, and you're limited on the output side of the NAS by a 1Gbit ethernet. So the pool isn't likely to be the madhouse-busy that'd really benefit from L2ARC, and the difference in sub-ms (L2ARC) or five-ms (fetched from pool) response time won't be noticed by the end user.

Appreciate the information and recommendations. I think I'll end up ditching the cache disc then.

Just to be sure, all the hardware I listed (not the MSI board) is compatible with FreeBSD right?
I know it might be an odd question to some, but just to get that out of the way.

 

[jgreco]

Any reason for the onboard GPU? The 1275's GPU isn't going to do you anything useful. You could consider the 1270 instead.

Read up carefully on the current state of USB support on the X11 series boards. I don't keep track so I'm just warning you that there may be issues, which may be resolved in FreeNAS 9.10 with the new USB support, but that's your homework to do, not mine.

The SSD is still perfectly usable as an SSD pool for jails or something like that.