Building a Home FreeNAS box from server parts from work

[Sartorius73]

I work on the admin side with the IT department at our clinic. The IT director will sometimes give out old hardware to people who want it. After telling him I wanted to get a 6+ bay NAS, he suggested a QNAP (which we use at some remote sites). After choking at the high prices for low-end hardware (6 bays with a Celeron J3455 and 4GB RAM for $900), I returned in earnest to FreeNAS and created a forum account. I know have the following hardware, gifted from IT:

Supermicro SuperServer 5018D-MF.

This has the following hardware in it:

Supermicro motherboard X10SLL-F.
Intel Xeon E3-1220 V3 Four core CPU.
16 GB (2X8GB) Crucial DDR3 PC3-14900E ECC UDIMM RAM.
Two Western Digital 500GB RE hard drives.

We're decommissioning another server and I think I can get this hardware too (at least the chassis, backplane and drives. Maybe the motherboard, RAM and CPUs.)

Supermicro Chassis SC743TQ-865.
Intel S5520HC motherboard.
Supermicro SAS743TQ Rev 3.0 Backplane.
Two Intel 5500 series Xeons (exact model not yet known).
48GB (12X4GB) Registered DDR3 RAM (exact model not yet known).
Eight 3TB Toshiba SATA hard drives (exact model not yet known).

I also have four 8TB Western Digital Red hard drives, shucked from the WD Easystore series that Best Buy has on sale for $150 from time to time.

Goals:

-Home network file server to stream 10-15 TB of movies and TV episodes to my AppleTV. Most are encoded at 1080p or 480p. No transcoding right now, but I can see a need in the future. No 4K video right now, but I can also see it in the future.
-User account backup from desktop and 4-5 laptops all running Windows 7/10. Roughly 3TB right now.
-Plex Server. Currently, the videos are served to my AppleTV3. I would prefer to use the Plex App in the AppleTV or switch to another streaming box (Roku, Amazon Firestick, etc.). My current 10 year old NAS is a Buffalo Terastation with an Atom D510 (don't laugh) and 4X2TB drives in a RAID5 running Windows 2008 Storage Server.
-VM running Pi-Hole to do whole house ad-blocking.

Budget:

Beyond what I've scrounged from my IT guy, I estimate another $3-400 for two more drives and two sticks of RAM. I could spend another $250-300 beyond this if needed. More would take approval and bribery to my wife.

Questions:

-With the hardware I listed above, is it reasonable to take the X10SLL-F board and the 16GB of RAM from the 5018D-MF and put it in the SC743 case? I realize the case is huge for that board.
-I will buy another two sticks of identical RAM to max out the board slots at 32GB. Is 32GB RAM sufficient for Plex, a VM or two and file serving duties? 32GB is the max for this board. I don't plan to run any other jails, but I guess that could change.
-I bought a Xeon E3-1245 V3 on eBay for $145. I'll sell the E3-1220 V3, since I do want hyperthreading and the 1220 doesn't have it. It looks like the 1220s are going for ~$100 on eBay. Does this seem like a reasonable CPU upgrade for a net $45?
-It seems that most are recommending 6+drives and using RAIDZ2. Should I pick up another two 8TB Reds? I realize my rebuild times will be, uh, long.
-The X10SLL-F has six SATA sockets. Can I use these to attach to the SAS743TQ backplane? And if I later want to add more drives, would I be able to use a flashed LSI HBA in the PCI-E slot to add them?

Final question: Am I trying to do too much with this motherboard? I could buy a full size ATX or even E-ATX board if needed, but I'd rather not. I think I could probably use the Intel board in the SC743 case, but I wondered about the power usage of two, old X55xx Xeons running all the time. The 5018D-MF box pulls about 42 watts at idle in its stock configuration from above.

Thanks in advance, and I hope this post isn't out of line for a new forum member.

 

[Chris Moore]

I will say more when I get to my office but it looks like your plan is good. I need to look at the specs for the parts a little to make sure my memory is correct, but I think the new CPU you bought has integrated video and you would not need, or be able to use that. It should still work.
Nothing wrong with a small board in a big chassis.
Welcome to the forum.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[Inxsible]

Free is always better than spending !

Your hardware should work for what you want to do with it. Plus, you can sell the 1U chassis( barebones) for a few bucks to reduce your overall cost.

Maxing out the RAM will help. @Chris Moore has already mentioned about the graphics chip in the Xeon 1245 -- but since you have already bought it, it's fine.

If you want to to RAIDZ2, you'd need all the drives up front. You cannot change the RAIDZx configuration unless you scrap everything and re-create the pool.

Final question: Am I trying to do too much with this motherboard? I could buy a full size ATX or even E-ATX board if needed, but I'd rather not. I think I could probably use the Intel board in the SC743 case, but I wondered about the power usage of two, old X55xx Xeons running all the time. The 5018D-MF box pulls about 42 watts at idle in its stock configuration from above.

No you are not trying to do too much with the X10SLL-F board. and you don't need to buy the ATX board.

However, given that the Intel board is a dual processor, you might be able to take advantage of the fact that you will have 2 CPUs + more RAM which means you will be able to do a lot more in terms of VMs. But if you see yourself as having no more than a VM or 2, then sell the Intel board and the 2xCPU for some cash back!

Also please let me know where you work so I can get my hands on the sweet hardware as well ;) -- it's great that they just hand out relatively new hardware (X10 is not that old) for free including HDDs. Most work places would never hand out HDDs for fear of someone getting to their precious data.

 

[Sartorius73]

Thanks to both of you. The 1245 CPU does have integrated graphics and I knew that when I bought it. I was looking at the 1240, 1241, 1245 and 1246, as they seemed to be the sweet spot for pricing on eBay. They all have similar TDP and clock speeds, so I wasn't too worried whether it had graphics or not.

 

[Chris Moore]

I think I could probably use the Intel board in the SC743 case, but I wondered about the power usage of two, old X55xx Xeons running all the time.

I agree with this. Those older Xeons burn too much power to make them worthy for home use. I replaced my socket 1366 Xeon system a couple years ago because of the power and heat and have been very happy with the system in my signature for almost 3 years.

The X10SLL-F has six SATA sockets. Can I use these to attach to the SAS743TQ backplane?

Yes.

if I later want to add more drives, would I be able to use a flashed LSI HBA in the PCI-E slot to add them?

Sure, you just need forward breakout cables to connect to that TQ backplane. My 24bay and both my 15 bay servers have the TQ backplanes. It is a mess of cables but it works fine. I like these cables because they are thin but they are a little fragile, so handle with care:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Mini-SAS-t...reakout-Internal-Cable-3-28-Feet/311689047579
This is an excelent SAS HBA, already in IT mode:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-H220-6G...0-IT-Mode-for-ZFS-FreeNAS-unRAID/162862201664
If you are going to a SAS controller, I would suggest putting all the drives on the same controller. I found that works better.

I realize my rebuild times will be, uh, long.

That depends on how much data you have. I have a pool of 60 drives at work where it takes about 4 days to resilver a drive (using WD Red Pro drives) but in one of the pools at home, I can resilver in about 2.5 hours (Using Seagate Desktop drives) and in one of my other pools at home (with the same amount of data) it is about 6 hours because the arrangement of drives and type of drives is different. A lot of factors go into the rebuild time.

It seems that most are recommending 6+drives and using RAIDZ2.

RAIDz2 is a happy middle ground between RAIDz1 and RAIDz3. Most people find that dedicating 2 drives to parity is enough; I do. It is totally fine to build a RAIDz2 vdev with as few as 4 drives and up to 10 drives and it really just depends on your needs. I wouldn't suggest doing 4 drives, but 6 or 8 is great and I have built vdevs with as many as 15 but the performance is really not as good (rebuild time) when you get a vdev that wide. General guidance, the lower the drive count in each vdev, the faster the rebuild but it still matters how much data is in the pool. You can have as many vdevs in the pool as you like.

-I bought a xeon E3-1245 V3 on eBay for $145. I'll sell the E3-1220 V3, since I do want hyperthreading and the 1220 doesn't have it. It looks like the 1220s are going for ~$100 on eBay. Does this seem like a reasonable CPU upgrade for a net $45?

Done deal really and it looks like a good trade. Don't worry.

I will buy another two sticks of identical RAM to max out the board slots at 32GB. Is 32GB RAM sufficient for Plex, a VM or two and file serving duties? 32GB is the max for this board. I don't plan to run any other jails, but I guess that could change.

My system runs a Plex jail and file sharing and another pool for iSCSI and I do it on 32GB of RAM and a Xeon E3-1230 V2 @ 3.30GHz. You should be fine depending on what you try to do with the VMs. What did you have in mind?

With the hardware I listed above, is it reasonable to take the X10SLL-F board and the 16GB of RAM from the 5018D-MF and put it in the SC743 case? I realize the case is huge for that board.

That is absolutely what I would do. If you had not said it yourself, I would have suggested it. Good call.
You can go to an even larger chassis later if you need more drives.

If you think you will need/want 8 drives, you should start with 8 drives, but they don't all need to be 8TB drives. You could build the pool with 4 x 8TB drives and 4 x 2TB drives all in one vdev together and the system would treat them all as 2TB drives. Then, as funding allowed, you could replace the 2TB drives with 8TB drives and when all the 8TB drives are installed, the usable capacity of the pool will auto expand.

 

[Chris Moore]

PS. It looks like you did some good research here, but did you look at these resources?

Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

Terminology and Abbreviations Primer
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/

There are more links under the "Useful Links" button in my signature.

 

[Sartorius73]

Related question: My 743TQ chassis has redundant 800 Watt power supplies. I disconnected one of them and the whole unit (with 4 hard drives) draws about 100 watts at idle. I'm planning to get 2-4 more drives. I've read on the forums that power supplies are not very efficient when only running at 10-20% of rated power and are quite efficient when running in the 40-60% range.

This leads me to two questions. First, is there any reason that I'd want to leave both power supplies plugged in and running, or am I just drawing power needlessly? Am I likely to have temporary power needs getting up near 800 watts? Should I leave one of the PSUs unplugged and rely on a UPS for shutdown/power failure protection. (Note: I'm getting a UPS anyway).

Second, suppose the system draws 250-300 watts at full load. Should I swap out the 800 watt PSUs and get a pair of 500 watt PSUs instead? That would put me closer to the more efficient range. This one, for example: http://store.supermicro.com/server-accessories/power-supplies/500w-1u-pws-501p-1r.html

I also contemplated selling the E5520 CPUs that came with the board in this chassis. They're going for $5-10 on eBay. That doesn't seem to be worth the effort. The 48GB of DDR3 ECC RDIMMs is probably worth selling.

I did just receive a used 9211-8i HBA off eBay, already flashed to IT mode. It sees the four 8 TB reds just fine. Getting close...

 

[Chris Moore]

The reason for 2 power supplies is for the times when one of those supplies has a failure that would take the system down.
I leave the redundancy in because I don't want any down time. The design of servers is usually not as focused on efficiency as it is on reliable operation.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[Inxsible]

Right. Redundant PSUs are just that. They provide redundancy in case one of them goes down.

You can choose to change the dual PSUs to the 500W. Make sure you get the same Platinum rated PSUs. No sense in downgrading to an unrated PSU. You can choose to go to a Gold rated one as well since they are good enough. Not all Supermicro PSUs are 80+ rated. However the most important thing will be to match the PSU (that you are buying) to the chassis that you have. Not all 1U PSUs will fit every chassis. The best way to do this would be to look up the PDF manual for your chassis and find the ~500W PSU that is listed in that manual. That is the only PSU that is guaranteed to fit your chassis. Others may or may not.

You can sell your existing PSUs on ebay. The Platinum rated PSUs do command a decent price on ebay. The difference between what you buy and what you sell might not be enough for you to take the effort though.

Good luck.