Building a NAS for home use, some input would be much help

[Kent Larsson]

I am building a NAS for home use. The main purpose will be to hold the movie collection (now spread out over a multitude of old computers no longer in use)

The hardware I want to go for is taken from jgreco advices here on the forum as follow:

Casing: Coler Master Cosmos II (i can get 15 drives to fit in that so it gives me room to expand)
Motherboard: SuperMicro X9SCM-F
Memory: 32 GB Kingston EEC
PSU: Corsair 550M 80+ Modular Gold
Drives: 6 Segate NAS 5900 RPM 4 Tb (to start with in two groups of 3, it will give protection for on drive failure in each group, perhaps a bit on the risky side)
Then i am planning to add groups of 3 drives when needed (and my wife stop screaming at me for spending money on hardware) up to the max 15 drives.
CPU some Core i3 i have not really looked in to it yet, i don't think i need a Xeon to push out movies to the HTPC.

The thing i am unclear about is the controller card, I want to get IBM's ServeRAID M1015 but there seem to be no second hand market for it here in Singapore where I am located at the moment.
Is there any mobo from superMicro that have the controller built in so I don't have get the extra card?
Another thing I am a bit unclear of is the how to get the power to all the drives.
Would be most helpful with any input.

 

[joeschmuck]

First, the MB you have listed already has 6 SATA ports.
Second, this system is overkill for serving up movies. I'd drop the RAM to 8GB or 16GB max, with six 4TB hard drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration that gives you just over 14TB of storage as well and if you go with RAIDZ1 it's 18TB of storage, however I would go with RAIDZ2 because reloading that much data take too much personal time if you loose all your data. So realistically, how much storage do you need?

As for adding in hard drives in two groups of 3, not good advice. Read Cyberjocks tag line and run through his presentations on ZFS and how it works. You must understand that before jumping into this or you will learn the hard way.

 

[Kent Larsson]

I have around 12 TB movies/TV spread out on different computers (some retired some in use) the whole idea with setting up the NAS is to get it in one place and have the ability to scale up the size since data is growing quite rapidly.

Would it be a better idea to make 3 VDev with 5 drives in each (starting with one set of five) and use RAIDZ2? this would go against the advice to use 2^n+2 for VDevs but then since the main purpose is to stream movies to the HTPC this might not be a problem. How much space would i lose for parity in this configuration?

Regarding the memory I thought it was a good idea to have one GB memory for each TB data stored, i don't mind going for 16 GB but I don't want to get in trouble later when I expand the system.
The cost is not the main issue, wife approval is more a concern, that's why i want to get the drives in separate batches (sets of 5 disk in with this configuration).

I am still a bit unclear of how the ServeRAID M1015 works, I plug in to the MOBO and the connect the SATA cables to the controller ?
And for the PSU do i need any adapters to split out power to 15 drives ?

Sorry for all the Noob questions.

 

[joeschmuck]

The RAM amount should be based on the expected use. Honestly 8GB should be enough for what you want to do and the 1GB per TB of storage is more for deduplication, not something any home user would want. It was also a rule of thumb in the early days (2 years ago) when we were all trying to run 4GB of RAM. Once you hit 8GB RAM all things look to run good.

Read this, it will help you understand how the vdev/pool work and if you still want to set up separate vdevs, that is fine.
http://forums.freenas.org/index.php...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

For the M1015, why don't you download the users manual for it, I'm sure a Google search will enlighten you.

Also, due to cost considerations, are you sure you need 12 TB of video available on demand? Just asking. I have 200 movies of which I could easily drop to my top 20 that I would actually watch again. It's not always about saying "I have the largest collection of video" because cost is a major factor. But of course I realize some people do desire that large video library which is fine but if you can reduce it, you could save a lot of money.

 

[cyberjock]

I disagree with joeschmuck. The 1GB per TB thumbrule was around before dedup was supported with ZFS. Dedup has it's own thumbrule of 5GB/TB of data minimum(and the theoretical upper limit is 80GB of RAM per TB of data!).

8GB of RAM pretty much keeps the machine stable(but performancemay suck)

For home users 16GB is generally the sweet spot. Once you go there you get a high enough performance that you'll never have a pressing need to add more RAM. There are exceptions but for 99% of home users a very large pool will still only need 16GB of RAM to keep your box nice and speedy.

 

[HoneyBadger]

One thing to note - with the X9SCM meaning LGA1155 socket, you'll have to make sure you get a third-gen i3 (so a 3220 or similar) in order to get official ECC support. The second-generation i3s did not receive official ECC support as per the Intel ARK reference. If you're only serving a single stream of video you could get away with a Pentium or Celeron as well, just make absolutely sure that they support ECC.

Disk config I say a six-disk RAIDZ2 vdev. Sure, you may not need to have 16TB of video available on-demand ... but if you can afford it, why not? ;)

 

[joeschmuck]

Did I get that Dedup thing wrong? I'm getting senile.

 

[gpsguy]

Yes, but since you a nice old man;) , we won't give you grief for it.

Did I get that Dedup thing wrong? I'm getting senile.