Building a big ass box for DAS

[Seed]

A buddy of mine wants to build a platform that will require a lot of disks. We're looking into using FreeNAS with a 24 BAY 4U case. These are likely obvious but this is our goal in order of priority:

Compatibility and Stability
Cost
Performance

The budget is pretty tight say around 7k and we plan on using standard 3TB drives. First we're doing some research to find out what we can get by with and what kind of I/O we could expect. Actual I/O requirements aren't available yet but I will have him talk to his team to get this figured out. So with that said what kind of hardware would you recommend for a 24x3TB RAID 60 setup?

Motherboard?

RAM?

RAID card?

The volume will be mounted to a head server that will run application software utilizing this device as DAS unless other configuration options are better suited.

Thanks!

Seed

 

[sunflashx]

The spreadsheet doesn't really translate well to message post, but it'll have to do. I put this together for someone else a while back, it's up and running well.

You can easily double the RAM for not much more, but it can take up to 192 GB. RAID cards are from ebay because they're drastically cheaper than buying new. They're the model everyone on here recommends, and that seem to get yanked out of a lot of corporate servers who have SAN instead of local storage. If money is tight you can subtract a processor but lose easy access to half the RAM slots, and drop the ZIL drives they're probably not needed anyway.

The 4 network interfaces give the OS grief with it's default settings. There's a fix here:
http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...becomes-unresponsive&p=794&viewfull=1#post794

Item Model Price Link
case SuperMicro SC846 1261 http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-cse-846e16-r1200b~7SUP922M.htm
psu Included
rails Included
drive cage "2x 2.5"" drive tray" 11 http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-mcp-220-84603-0n~9SUP90R7.htm
mb SuperMicro X8DTi-LN4F 429 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182219
cpu Intel Xeon E5620 389 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117234
cpu Intel Xeon E5620 389 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117234
cpu sink Intel BXSTS100A 32 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835203002
cpu sink Intel BXSTS100A 32 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835203002
ram 3x8GB ECC (24GB) 259 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139273
3x8GB ECC (24GB) 259 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139273
sata card IBM M1015 135 http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-ServeRA...RAID_Cards&hash=item4abb075ff8#ht_1076wt_1185
sata card IBM M1015 135 http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-ServeRA...RAID_Cards&hash=item4abb075ff8#ht_1076wt_1185
sata card IBM M1015 135 http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-ServeRA...RAID_Cards&hash=item4abb075ff8#ht_1076wt_1185
flash boot sandisk 4g 12.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171497
zil mirror Intel 711 eMLC 100GB 114 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167062
zil mirror Intel 711 eMLC 100GB 114 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167062
l2arc intel 510 MLC 250GB 489 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167043
Drives



4195.99