Boot, SLOG and special vdev on the same mirror?

[Jamberry]

After a lot of thinking, I came down a little bit. I tuned down my requirements a lot. I got a little bit lost, because the 25Gbit my ISP offers me sounded so cool and I wanted to try out new technologies. But to be perfectly honest, 1Gbit speed is probably enough. So my current sober thinking is this:

I could get a A2SDi-4C-HLN4F as TrueNAS as recommended by @Patrick M. Hausen. Thanks for the tip! This board would offer 8 SATA Ports and a NVM or USB header for the boot disk. It has 4 NICs, so trunking would provide enough performance for multiple 1Gbit clients accessing data.
For RAM I would start with two 64GB RDIMMs. My current TrueNAS has 64GB and ARC hit ratio is around 98%, lowest I saw was 92%.
Unfortunately, I will not be able to try out special vdevs, because I don't have enough SATA ports, but I am not sure if that would have really helped in practice. As far as I understand it, serving metadata from ARC is faster anyway.

For my Hypervisor, I will stay with my X11SCM-F Proxmox with two nvme drives in mirror. For the unimportant VMs I don't really care, I could use TrueNAS as the destination and force async. For the other VMs, I am currently happy with the performance I have right now. If I wan't more read performance, I could add more RAM to get a bigger ARC, to gain write performance, I could add a SLOG later on.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Keep in mind that you will have to use an NVME/PCIe M.2 drive for booting, if you plan to use all 8 SATA ports. The M.2 socket on the mainboard supports both SATA and PCIe, but you cannot use SATA in that case.

 

[Jamberry]

Keep in mind that you will have to use an NVME/PCIe M.2 drive for booting, if you plan to use all 8 SATA ports. The M.2 socket on the mainboard supports both SATA and PCIe, but you cannot use SATA in that case.

One of my video editing "ghetto builds" I donated to a friend has an external 2,5" USB disk as boot disk. Works pretty good for over a year now

 

[Constantin]

FWIW, my 8-HDD, 5 SSD, etc. system idles around 100W, and that’s with a lot of fans to keep things quite cool. File only server, uses the d-1537 as a CPU. Not bad considering it’s 10GbE, SLOGged, L2arced and special vDEV’d.

If you went with the D1508 version of this board, I’d expect a few watts less consumption.

 

[Jamberry]

Interesting. Both are 600Fr. the X10SDV-2C-7TP4F and the X10SDV-2C-7TP4F.

Product Compare | Supermicro

www.supermicro.com

X10 has 20 SATA Ports and SFP+ while the A2 has newer CPU and 256GB memory support.

 

[Etorix]

X10 has 20 SATA Ports and SFP+ while the A2 has newer CPU and 256GB memory support.

Actually, X10SDV-2C-7TP4F has 4 SATA and 16 SAS from the on-board LSI HBA ('7') and SFP+ ('TP'). Slower memory (DDR4-1866) but I suspect that it can actually host more 128 GB using denser RDIMM than what was available at the time of release.
A2SDi-4C-HLN4F has only 8 SATA and 1 GbE. If I remember Supermicro's product stack correctly, you have to upgrade to a C3758 to have 12 SATA and 10 GbE (A2SDi-H-TF).

For a storage platform, the older X10 is a no-brainer here!

 

[Constantin]

I agree that the D1508 is a non brainer as a dedicated file server platform since it offers a lot more PCIe lanes for supermicro to play with than the atom platform. Room for a real SLOG (x4), HBA for SAS, 10GbE SFP+ for inexpensive fast network performance. With 128GB RAM, it’s pretty hard to run out of RAM, etc.

BUT… this is not a small board. Its size should be ok for folk who want a lot of HDDs because that will entail a bigger case. But don’t expect to fit this into a Q26, XL+, or like mini-ITX case, no matter how many unnatural things you might try. It won’t fit.