BUILD Building my first FreeNAS: Hardware questions

[havok2022]

Hello all,

New user to the forum, but I've been creeping here reading posts off and on for a month or two. I have some fresh hardware and gift cards from Christmas and am ready to begin building my first NAS. My primary motivation is to build a Plex server / storage solution for my home. I would also like to move Time Machine backups for my laptop to this solution as well, but not a requirement as I already have a time capsule. In terms of Plex, I don't know how much transcoding I'll require, but I generally prefer running everything at the highest quality possible. I generally rip to .MKV and don't compress at all. With that said, I would like the ability to comfortably transcode 2-3 1080P streams.

I plan on running RAID Z1 with 3TB Red drives. (I have 1 already and MicroCenter has a pretty good price on them. Total I will either run 4 or 5 drives, but am undecided at the moment). Cost is a factor, but I also prefer to build something that will do what I want as well as offer future expansion.

I currently have the following hardware for use in this build:

Case: Fractal Node 804 (Supports more drives than the 304 and can take microATX if required. Better airflow)
Hard Drive: 1 x 3Tb WD Red. Plan on purchasing 3 or 4 more. Not certain.
PSU: Corsair HX650. I realize this is probably way overkill, but its modular and has tons of SATA connections. Its unopened and can still be returned if there are better suggestions.

Where I'm currently stuck is motherboard/CPU options. I like what the ASRock C2550D4I offers in terms of size, SATA ports, etc but wasn't sure if it had enough horsepower to do Plex in the way that I want. The C2750D4I is a bit out of my price range as is Xeon. I may be leaning towards a mATX SuperMicro board and core i3 if that will be sufficient. I understand that will support ECC RAM? I can also pick one up locally if needed, which is kind of nice as I live 5 min from a Micro Center. Really I am just looking for suggestions at the moment. I think the drives for the price are pretty good right now, but I am open to suggestions ($99 for 3TB Red). Any guidance the forum members are willing to provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

 

[DJ9]

You should check out this link for some recommendations.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hardware-recommendations-read-this-first.23069/

 

[havok2022]

You should check out this link for some recommendations.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hardware-recommendations-read-this-first.23069/

Thanks, I've read this a few times over and I think its great for general questions. What is a bit of an unknown to me is the Plex portion. I've seen some posts from Cyberjock stating that Plex eats up additional memory. I also know that I need something that supports ECC memory. I'm somewhat leaning towards a Supermicro mATX with an i3-4370 or the ASRock C2550D4I. I think that the Xeons may be a bit out of my budget all told. I was planning on 16GB ECC and going with either 9 or 12TB RAID Z1 (4 x 3TB or 5 x 3TB).

 

[Ericloewe]

Thanks, I've read this a few times over and I think its great for general questions. What is a bit of an unknown to me is the Plex portion. I've seen some posts from Cyberjock stating that Plex eats up additional memory. I also know that I need something that supports ECC memory. I'm somewhat leaning towards a Supermicro mATX with an i3-4370 or the ASRock C2550D4I. I think that the Xeons may be a bit out of my budget all told. I was planning on 16GB ECC and going with either 9 or 12TB RAID Z1 (4 x 3TB or 5 x 3TB).

The C2550 might be a bit slow for plex, but the Haswell solution should work, if you stick to 1-2 streams (Xeons will handle more). 16GB should be enough, but if you find that performance (not transcoding, but file sharing) is low, add RAM. RAIDZ2 is also strongly recommended over RAIDZ1.

 

[AltecBX]

I've run 5 transcoding movies at the same time (720P and 1080P) with my setup below. No lags whatsoever.
I'll be pushing the envelope next month.

 

[marbus90]

C2550 can't handle 3 streams. the C2750 is >50% utilisation then. Core i3 should support 4 streams. Also theres the ASRock E3C224D2I which would go with the Node 304.

Note that the ASRock C2x50D4I boards only run 8 drives with freenas, the Marvell 4port controller doesn't work.

I'd recommend to max out the SATA Ports first (which would be 6-8 ports), create a z2 on that and if you need more space, replace the disks with bigger ones. you can't grow a single vdev horizontally with adding more drives, just vertically trough replacing disks with bigger ones.

 

[havok2022]

The C2550 might be a bit slow for plex, but the Haswell solution should work, if you stick to 1-2 streams (Xeons will handle more). 16GB should be enough, but if you find that performance (not transcoding, but file sharing) is low, add RAM. RAIDZ2 is also strongly recommended over RAIDZ1.

Is there an inherent issue with RAIDZ1? My preference would be storage efficiency over redundancy. If there is an especially compelling reason for Z2 over Z1 though I have no issue going that route.

I went ahead and picked up 3 more WD Red drives as well as a Core i3-4370. I'll be likely ordering the motherboard and RAM today and possibly another 1-2 Red drives.

 

[Ericloewe]

Is there an inherent issue with RAIDZ1? My preference would be storage efficiency over redundancy. If there is an especially compelling reason for Z2 over Z1 though I have no issue going that route.

I went ahead and picked up 3 more WD Red drives as well as a Core i3-4370. I'll be likely ordering the motherboard and RAM today and possibly another 1-2 Red drives.

RAIDZ1 depends on the absolute integrity of all remaining drives if one fails. This has led to several corrupted pools. RAIDZ2 maintains redundancy even after a single drive failure, eliminating that problem, and allows for a second drive failure, if you're really unlucky (at which point, you're gambling like you were in a RAIDZ1 with a single failure).

 

[havok2022]

One further question I had at this time (I've since ordered RAM and a motherboard). The WD Red drives I've purchased are part of a retail box kit, and as such the model numbering doesn't match what you tend to see elsewhere. If I were to purchase an additional 3TB Red drive elsewhere, is this a problem or do the drives need to be exactly the same?

 

[marbus90]

You can even run 6TB Hitachi and 4TB Reds in the same vdev. No problem there.

 

[havok2022]

So far the hardware I have either purchased or have ordered is as follows:

Case: Fractal Node 804
PSU: Corsair HX-650 (still think this may be overkill but I think at the time it was as cheap as the lower powered ones.)
CPU: Intel Core i3-4370
Motherboard: Supermicro X10-SL7-F-O
RAM: Crucial CT2KIT102472BD160B 2 x 8GB DDR3 1600 ECC
HDDs: WD Red 3TB x 4 (will purchase either 1 or 2 more. Not sure yet.)
USB: Corsair Voyager 16GB USB 2.0
Disc: Panasonic UJ-265 Slim Blu-ray Writer (Works with the Node 804 and was only $5 more than the DVD writer with mediocre ratings).

After reading through some of these posts as well as cyberjocks presentation I will likely be using RAID Z2 and will run Plex in a jail. The only question mark I currently have is RAM amount.

 

[AltecBX]

16GB of Ram will do. If you can splurge just a bit more, go with 32Gb.

 

[Jailer]

Make sure you plan out your storage carefully. You post that you may add 1 or 2 hard drives but you do realize you can't expand a vdev once it's created without destroying it and starting over.

If you plan on going with RAIDZ2 for your vdev (and you should) I would go with at least 2 more drives for a 6 drive vdev. If your future needs require more storage that leaves you the option of adding another vdev or replacing the drives in your existing vdev with larger drives or both.

Also skip the DVD drive. That board has IPMI and you wont need it.

Nice choice on your hardware. You will be very pleased with it.

 

[chrisjbarry]

I vote for 6 total drives and z2. If one drive fails then it can take a long time to rebuild that failed drive. During that time a second drive may fail on you.


Sent from pay phone in the airport.

 

[Scharbag]

My Z2 array with 3TB drives takes about 30 hours to resilver (longer I think due to my poor choice of an 8 disk vDev). A z1 array would be at risk of corruption during this time.

Go with Z2!! And stick with 6 disk Z2 vDevs. In the future, you can add 6 more or, as said above, replace your 3TB drives with bigger ones one at a time. Just remember, bigger drives take longer to resilver.

I wish I was uber rich and could make a nice SSD only based storage array. I would be silly overkill but very cool. :P

 

[havok2022]

My Z2 array with 3TB drives takes about 30 hours to resilver (longer I think due to my poor choice of an 8 disk vDev). A z1 array would be at risk of corruption during this time.

Go with Z2!! And stick with 6 disk Z2 vDevs. In the future, you can add 6 more or, as said above, replace your 3TB drives with bigger ones one at a time. Just remember, bigger drives take longer to resilver.

I wish I was uber rich and could make a nice SSD only based storage array. I would be silly overkill but very cool. :p

I had completely forgot that my original intent was to just use my Core i7 desktop for Plex before I changed direction and went the NAS route. I purchased a 2 x 3TB drives back in the summer and installed them in my PC but never really put anything on them. They aren't the matching red drives. I have 1 x WD Green (which I ran wdidle3 on and set to max timeout) and a Toshiba drive. I figure I can replace these down the road with Reds if there is an issue. So I guess thats a long way of saying I have 6 drives now. They're in the node 804 cages in the case now and hooked to power. I also threw in an additional intake fan on the drive side. Waiting for the motherboard, RAM and disk drive to all arrive. Should all be here by Friday or Saturday.

 

[Scharbag]

I started with 5 2TB drives in a windows box...

Now look at what I have done...

Fun though!

 

[havok2022]

System is assembled. Already encountered a bad drive that I had to return/replace. More to follow.

 

[Scharbag]

Boo to bad drives. Hope it will work out for ya!

 

[havok2022]

So far everything is running pretty smooth. I do have one error that I'm unsure about, but it doesn't seem to be impacting performance. Its a yellow alarm, and the message is below:
WARNING: Firmware version 15 does not match driver version 16 for /dev/mps0

Anyone encounter this and know how to resolve?