Can I use this old gaming hardware?

[Dominik78]

Hello Friends!

I've got an old gaming PC lying around that I'm thinking of using to get some exposure with FreeNAS and perhaps use it for Plex. All the media I plan to put on the NAS will exist elsewhere, and all other data will be tertiary backups. Obviously, the hardware below does not have ECC memory. I'm not worried about the Data, as it will be backed up in other places and I want some experience with FreeNAS before I decide to buy dedicated hardware. My question is how often systems go bad without ECC? Are the odds in my favor that this system could stay alive for 1-2 years without corruption, or is the deck stacked against me?

Hardware:
ASUS Rampage III Formula LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131666

Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield Quad-Core 3.06 GHz LGA 1366 130W BX80601950 Processor
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115211

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 12GB (3 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2000 (PC3 16000) Desktop Memory Model F3-16000CL9T-12GBRM
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231408

The goal is to have 4 or 5 x 2TB, again, mostly movies etc. I'll probably also take out the older gaming GPU and put something basic in there for the sake of power consumption.

Is this good enough to get my feet wet with, or will it cause more issues than it's worth?

 

[RodyMcAmp]

This system will work fine with 1 caveat, no ecc memory compatibility. If you ever get really serious about storing your files in a more secure/safe manner you will probably want to upgrade to some entry grade server hardware. There is a sticky on these forums with some hardware recommendations.

 

[Quebecman]

Looks like a very nice setup if you want to experiment and create jails and VMs down the road; you'll have plenty of power for that.

You may end up a little tight with memory though, or may experience no problems at all. 16GB would be a sure spot if you run into performance issues as I understand it, considering the number of drives and total TB, but that's if you want to run jails and VMs other than the Plex on top. But go ahead with what you have, it's worth it. The extra 4GB can wait as you evaluate it.

You won't have major issues with this hardware, but it won't be perfection for data integrity. It's a gamble and I dare say chances are in your favour. Give yourself time to make mistakes and to understand the inner workings, and do expect a major catastrophe with your data and you're set.

Personally, I started with one old expendable regular hard drive just to try a first install, made mistakes, read the manual some more, then moved from there to 3 x 1TB WD Red.

Make sure you understand the difference between having 4x and 5x drives, there are many scenarios for Raid-Z setups that can apply to each, e.g.: maybe you'll want to match two drives for a mirror setup, then three for a RaidZ1 setup... or all five on a RaidZ2. Or just 4 on a mirror setup... etc. But don't rely on me here, I'm still learning RaidZ.

There is a LOT to learn.

 

[Dominik78]

Looks like a very nice setup if you want to experiment and create jails and VMs down the road; you'll have plenty of power for that.

You may end up a little tight with memory though, or may experience no problems at all. 16GB would be a sure spot if you run into performance issues as I understand it, considering the number of drives and total TB, but that's if you want to run jails and VMs other than the Plex on top. But go ahead with what you have, it's worth it. The extra 4GB can wait as you evaluate it.

You won't have major issues with this hardware, but it won't be perfection for data integrity. It's a gamble and I dare say chances are in your favour. Give yourself time to make mistakes and to understand the inner workings, and do expect a major catastrophe with your data and you're set.

Personally, I started with one old expendable regular hard drive just to try a first install, made mistakes, read the manual some more, then moved from there to 3 x 1TB WD Red.

Make sure you understand the difference between having 4x and 5x drives, there are many scenarios for Raid-Z setups that can apply to each, e.g.: maybe you'll want to match two drives for a mirror setup, then three for a RaidZ1 setup... or all five on a RaidZ2. Or just 4 on a mirror setup... etc. But don't rely on me here, I'm still learning RaidZ.

There is a LOT to learn.

Thanks for all that feedback Quebecman! I'll definitely look into the various RAID types. I think I might also be able to upgrade to 24GB of RAM on this system pretty inexpensively, so I might do that too!

 

[JohnDigital]

You will be fine under your stated circumstance. Disable anything not necessary to being a server in the bios, audio, bulky video cards, serial ports, basically everything but SATA, USB, and ethernet. You dont need or want any more overhead than absolutely necessary.

 

[Dominik78]

One additional question. What is (very approximately) the maximum read/write performance (for contiguous data) I could expect from a simple setup using about 5x2GB disks (each capable of 200MB/s r/w). The FreeNAS box will be directly connected to my PC via 10Gb. I would like to very quickly push around some massive files (that are also backed up elsewhere). I heard ZFS has some strong performance penalties, but I'm having a hard time finding information to help predict performance based on various factors.

Since I'm just going to be using this box as a repository for big but unimportant files, I'm wondering if maybe just buying a RAID controller and throwing some OS on the box and doing a RAID 5 might be more cost effective (in terms of time invested). RAID5 just because it would be a slight nuisance to repopulate the storage pool.

 

[icsy7867]

Do you have any experience with other Linux distro's or networking?
If you didn't want to deploy a FreeNAS system because of the lack of ECC memory, you could always try an ESXi server since it is free for personal use. Not sure if you have this need either way though.

Of course if you just wanted to mess around with FreeNAS that's cool too! If you decided you wanted to get serious with FreeNAS and get ECC hardware, you can always reuse the drives. Personally I would give the FreeNAS at least a try. Once you have the drives, upgrading to "server" equipment really isn't that expensive (but I guess that is all relative isn't it?).

Also I have learned some much about BSD and the CLI from tinkering around with FreeNAS! I would definitely recommend it even if you just want to learn something new. Just my two cents. And sorry I can't really help you with your throughput issue. But from my knowledge it is highly dependent on your vdev configuration and your read/write caches. Hopefully someone else can have a better answer to that.

 

[tvsjr]

When considering "speed", there's really 3 important values to consider... bandwidth (how many MBps), IOPS (operations/second), and latency (time to deliver the first bit of data). It sounds like you really care about bandwidth.

For a somewhat close comparison, here's the performance on a 6-drive RAIDZ2 using HGST 7200RPM SAS drives. Full system specs in my sig block.

Code:

[root@freenas] /mnt/Tier2/NoCompression# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/Tier3/NoCompression/zerofile bs=1M count=1000000
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1048576000000 bytes transferred in 3568.089240 secs (293876058 bytes/sec)
[root@freenas] /mnt/Tier2/NoCompression# dd if=/mnt/Tier3/NoCompression/zerofile of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1000000
1000000+0 records in
1000000+0 records out
1048576000000 bytes transferred in 2005.229230 secs (522920764 bytes/sec)

294MB/sec writes, 523MB/sec reads. That's for a single-threaded IO with the pool idle otherwise. If you start having multiple users running (higher IOPS demand), where the drives are being forced to seek back and forth, bandwidth will drop precipitously. This isn't an FN problem, nor a ZFS problem... this is a physics problem.

ZFS doesn't have "strong" performance penalties, if you compare it to systems that provide equal levels of data protection. ZFS is quite a bit more paranoid about data safety than, say, your average PERC/similar RAID controller.

If you want faster, my 12-drive array (used as a VM store) of HGST 7200RPM SATA NAS drives writes at 716MB/sec and reads at 1,082MB/sec.

 

[m0nkey_]

Hello Friends!

I've got an old gaming PC lying around that I'm thinking of using to get some exposure with FreeNAS and perhaps use it for Plex. All the media I plan to put on the NAS will exist elsewhere, and all other data will be tertiary backups. Obviously, the hardware below does not have ECC memory. I'm not worried about the Data, as it will be backed up in other places and I want some experience with FreeNAS before I decide to buy dedicated hardware. My question is how often systems go bad without ECC? Are the odds in my favor that this system could stay alive for 1-2 years without corruption, or is the deck stacked against me?

Hardware:
ASUS Rampage III Formula LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131666

Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield Quad-Core 3.06 GHz LGA 1366 130W BX80601950 Processor
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115211

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 12GB (3 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2000 (PC3 16000) Desktop Memory Model F3-16000CL9T-12GBRM
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231408

The goal is to have 4 or 5 x 2TB, again, mostly movies etc. I'll probably also take out the older gaming GPU and put something basic in there for the sake of power consumption.

Is this good enough to get my feet wet with, or will it cause more issues than it's worth?

I would advise against using an old gaming PC for FreeNAS, because the hardware usually isn't certified to operate with FreeBSD (FreeNAS base OS) and the on-board NICs are typically Realtek, which are known to have performance issues.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/

 

[brando56894]

There is a LOT to learn.

This isn't an exaggeration. I spent about 2 months reading about ZFS when I switched from RAID 5 and Linux mdadm lol

One additional question. What is (very approximately) the maximum read/write performance (for contiguous data) I could expect from a simple setup using about 5x2GB disks (each capable of 200MB/s r/w).

As tvsjr stated, it depends on your setup. Do you want RAIDZ1/2/3 (RAID 5,6,7) or do you want to do striped mirrors (RAID 10)? There's costs and benefits to each: RAIDZ2 and 3 offer more security via redundancy but have a larger write hit since parity has to be calculated for each bit written, IOPS are limited to that of a single drive (I think that's right) and in order to see an increase in total pool size you need to upgrade every drive with equal sizes, also resilvering can take days for large pools. If using mirrors (like I do) there is less redundancy since losing two drives in the same mirrored set will kill the entire pool( but that is less likely to happen and a hot spare can negate this risk); there is a vastly larger number of IOPS available since data is being duplicated to one drive and parity isn't calculated for everything, this also makes resilvering take less than 4 hours instead of days; also an increase in total space is realized once you upgrade two drives, along with this you can have drives in any capacity, as long as two are the same, I currently have 6x 4TB, and 4x 1 TB. There is a whole thread by jgreco in the help section (I believe) if you want to know more about it. Mirrors tend to be faster, I forget that the read and write speed of my pool is but I've seen it do sequential writes at around 700-1,000 MB/sec, random reads and writes around 500 MB/sec.

 

[Dominik78]

Thank you TVSR for all those details. You guess correctly and I care less about latency and random access as much as sequential reads and writes in this case, and your performance numbers look good.

m0nkey, thanks for the link. The onboard NIC is Intel, but I will also be buying a 10Gb nics Based on this write up if anyone is interested:
https://blog.brianmoses.net/2016/06/building-a-cost-conscious-faster-than-gigabit-network.html

Thanks for the input Brando. I really wasn't considering Mirrors very much due to wanting to squeeze a bit more space out the drives, but the performance numbers you and the quick resilver times certainly do look very nice! I think that part of the decision will largely depend on what kind of drives I find for what kind of price.

Excellent feedback, thank guys!

 

[brando56894]

Thanks for the input Brando. I really wasn't considering Mirrors very much due to wanting to squeeze a bit more space out the drives, but the performance numbers you and the quick resilver times certainly do look very nice! I think that part of the decision will largely depend on what kind of drives I find for what kind of price.

You're welcome, going with mirrors always hits where it hurts (loss of space) but the benefits are worth it in my opinion. I always wanted to give RAID10 a try but could never rationalize cutting my total space in half, now that I have 26 TB total, 12.8 TB of usable space isn't that bad :D Here's the thread about Mirrors I was talking about: https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...d-why-we-use-mirrors-for-block-storage.44068/