Building a 20HDD Bay NAS, need some hardware (and softwere) help and advices

[Manuel F. Almeida]

Hello Im going to buy a 20 HDD bays case, Lian Li pc-D8000, I've chosen some hardware to go along with it but I wanted your advice on it, especially motherboard related. I will be filling it up with the passage of time, with 4TB hdd's (only JBOD / raid0 allows this?)

So, what I've chosen so far:

Motherboard - Super Micro D-X9SCA-F-O

CPU - Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1220L v2 (3M Cache, 2.30 GHz)

RAM - Kingston ECC 8GB KVR16E11/8I or the 16gb one.

PSU - SeaSonic SSR-650RM 650W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular Active (I want to know if I go for this modular PSU will I have enough SATA power connectors) ?


Ok, so what do you think of these specs? Will it hold? I want to install freenas on a ZFS file - system and the purpose for the NAS is storage for MKV's in order to stream to 3 media-players around the house via Gigabit LAN.

Sofware questions:

First, in order to build the ZFS file system, will I be able to add HDD's in the future quickly?
Second, Is it possible to turn 3 4TB HDD's into "one" hdd in terms of space? for ex: a big 10 TB disk which network (and windows pc's) can access ? AKA JBOD ?

Third, I will buy from here on, only 4TB drives. But atm i have ONE 4tb TWO 3 TB and TWO 1TB HDD's.

The NAS is intended, as said, only for streaming and storing MKV's, if I go for a RAIDz0 or 5 or whatever, I wont be using the full capacity of the 4TB disks because I'll be limited by the small capacity ones, right?
Also, if I go for a raid system I can only buy (for ex) 4 HDD's at each time, right? The only plug and play solution would be JBOD ?

 

[raidflex]

For that much storage I would go with at least 16GB memory, but would recommend 32GB. ZFS will use all the ram you give it and perform better. If this is just for storage and not for use with any plugins, the E3-1220Lv2 should be fine, but you may also want to consider a E3-1230V2 which has 4 cores+ HT, which is much faster and will still idle at around 30W if power is a concern.

I would also pick up a IBM M1015 SAS controller and flash it to IT mode, I have one and they work great with Freenas.

As far as storage, I would stick with at least RAIDZ2 and if above 8 drives I would recommend RAIDZ3. I would not use RAIDZ1, it just does not offer enough fault tolerance. The chances of a drive failing during a resilver is greatly increased and with RAIDZ1 if that happens you will lose the Data. Also try to stick with the WD Red drives, they offer a great price-performance and are designed for use in a RAID environment.

Check out the WiKi for info on storage expansion. http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Volumes

PS: Personally I would also not go beyond 13 HDDs in one vdev, others may have more input on this, as i do not currently run more then 8 in one vdev. I would split it up into 2 vdevs of 10 HDDs each using RAIDZ3. You can still have all of these in one pool so it will show up as one single storage space.

 

[vegaman]

Another option is 4 RAIDz vdevs with 5 drives each - if you're comfortable with single drive parity on each vdev. Bad idea.
You'll need to get molex->sata power adapters or splitters to get enough sata power plugs. Also be prepared for an absolute mess of cables using 20 drives without backplanes. You'll also want to sort out a way of identifying the drives in case one fails - doesn't have to be complex, just putting them in order of ports should allow you to work it out.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 4

 

[Manuel F. Almeida]

But with those raid options will I be able to purchase and add on the go new hdd's ? I dont want to buy 20 HDD all at one time LOL.

Vegaman u mentioned mess with cables? But im going for a modular psu!

 

[vegaman]

No you can't add drives one at a time. You'll have to add one vdev at a time. 6 or 10 drives per vdev should work well. I've decided against RAIDZ1 for my own build (too many horror stories of people losing their entire array).

The mess of cables is because you'll have 20 individual sata and power cables for the drives. You'll be able to find some ways to improve that though. Such as using power cables like these http://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=454&area=en

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 4

 

[wussy]

Hi,

Here is my configuration that is working fine in a company environment for over a year now:
http://forums.freenas.org/threads/72-tb-brutto-storage-for-backup.6684/#post-25944

If you have any questions please don´t hesitate to ask

 

[Manuel F. Almeida]

wussy thanks !!! I want this config to be for streaming multimedia for home use only. But im currently assessing all options.

One question, for 20 HDD's I will need some kind of pci card for those extra slots when connecting so many disks right? Im clueless!

 

[Manuel F. Almeida]

Vegaman with raid 5 on pools of 10 hdd do u think im fine?

That means ill have to purchase for one vdev at least 5 or 6 drives at a time?

 

[vegaman]

No I wouldn't recommend RAID5 of any size with 4TB drives. The likelihood of something going wrong with another drive during a rebuild is way too high.
Yeah you'll need to buy a lot of drives at once, the 'magic' numbers for RAIDZ2 would be 4 (a bit pointless IMO) 6 or 10 drives.

 

[wussy]

Yeah of course you will need enough Sata ports. Take a look again on my specs. The Adaptec Controller wasn't too expensive and in my opinion it is doing well.
You can also see the write/read speed in that thread. I think this will be plenty enough for streaming even big mkv files. In my opinion it's more the network which is the bottleneck.
At home I have also a FreeNas device running 8 discs in 2 pools. It is serving three different video players. Most of the files are full hd mkv or mpegs and everything is working fine.

 

[vegaman]

For price/driver support I'd recommend the IBM M1015 controller, you could also use a Dell H310 but you'll have to search around more to find instructions on flashing it to IT firmware.

 

[Manuel F. Almeida]

wussy maybe you can shed some lights here? http://forums.freenas.org/threads/x...015-question-about-sff-8087.15653/#post-78390

I would have to use 3 of those then? vegaman ??

X9SCA motherboard from supermicro would support all those 3 ?