Can you check a newbie Hardware list?

[ChrisB]

Hi,

Im a newbie to Freenas. Im in the UK. Ive previously had NAS solutions from QNAP, Ive run two of these for a while, one for the CCTV server storage, and another for storing photos, films, important documents etc.. Setup in a raid 5.

Ive recently had some work done on the house, made space for adedicated home cinema, the kids will soon be of an age that they want to watch their own stuff, and now its time to setup a propper server.

Im looking to build a machine that can handle the ripping of my blu ray/dvd collection, be a plex server to share the media out to two kids and myself and the wife, and have redundancy and security built in so I can store all our holiday snaps etc in one location too.

Ive never delved into Freenas before, having only ever run windows boxes and iSCSI storage to a nas box. Its time I moved on.

So far Ive got the following spec ready to order:

2 x Sandisk 16gb USB 2.0 drives
Supermicro X10SL7-F
Xeon E3-1240 v3
2 x 16GB crucial DDR3 PC3 1600 ECC unbuffered CAS 11
8 x HGST 4TB deskstar NAS.
EVGA 650W 80Plus gold PSU

Case will be some rackmount ATX that I can find with enough airflow.


Can anyone see any glaring oversights or issues that I may experience with the above?

Looking forward to getting this all set up and my movies somewhere a little more stable than a raid5 Qnap nas.

Ill no doubt be posting questions asking about setup and configuring redundancy too :)

 

[Fuganater]

With RaidZ2 you will have ~24TB of space which will be nice. (well less after formating)

List looks good. What chassis have you looked at so far?

 

[ChrisB]

Havent looked at a chassis yet, as Im trying to get it to fit in a rack. Though it looks like airflow will be an issue with the standard 19" cases, I may just have to stick it in something like a fractal design and just sit it in the bottom of the rack. Would be nice tohave a rackmount though and use the rack for waht it was designed for.

Ive swapped the ram to 2 x 16GB 1.5v, as it works out cheaper, and leaves slots spare.

 

[Nick2253]

First comment: redundancy does not equal backup. Make sure you have a backup of anything important to you on the NAS. Using your QNAP as a backup would not be a bad idea, but then you don't have any off-site backup.

How does your CCTV utilize your NAS? Does it continuously stream data to your NAS? Or does it only right when it detects "events" or something like that? If it continuously writes data, your setup may be insufficient. Don't forget, ZFS is a copy on write file system, so any changes you make to an existing file require an entire read and then write of that file.

When you say "handle the ripping of my blu ray/dvd collection", do you mean performing the ripping? Or do you just mean storing the output from your ripping? If the latter, you'll be just fine.

Ive swapped the ram to 2 x 16GB 1.5v, as it works out cheaper, and leaves slots spare.

That's not going to work: check your motherboard specs.

DIMM sizes: 8GB, 4GB, 2GB, 1GB
Memory Capacity: Supports up to 32 GB DDR3 ECC Un-Buffered memory (UDIMM)

 

[ChrisB]

Ah yes, just noticed the spec on the motherboard - I knew there was a reason why I chose the 8GB over the 16GB, and just realised what it was.

The CCTV will still continue to record to a QNAP nas. It writes when events are detected. The footage from this is not overly important to me to be backed up and stored on the home server, Im going to try and keep the CCTV network and the home media network separated as much as possible.

Im looking for the server to do the actual ripping, rather than have a PC set aside to seperately perform this task. The speed of this ripping is not overly important to me, just so long as the machine is capable of doing it.

I was hoping to have the server hold duplicate data to guard against data loss, rather than rely on another device for backup. External backup would probably be done via some cloud storage company, though having not researched this, Ive not made any decision on this as yet.

 

[Darren Myers]

You might consider one of the supermicro chassis's as they have redundant PSU's, you can find 12,24,and 36 bay variants, although im not sure how you will make out in the UK.

 

[ChrisB]

The suppliers are out of stock of the crucial memory, so now looking at other stock they have to see if its compatible. They have the low profile crucial stuff, but I begrudge paying an extra £60 (near $90) for exactly the same memory in a low profile format as I dont need the low profile...

 

[Nick2253]

Im looking for the server to do the actual ripping, rather than have a PC set aside to seperately perform this task. The speed of this ripping is not overly important to me, just so long as the machine is capable of doing it.

This will be problematic for you. This thread will give you some insight in this process: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/how-to-see-dev-cd0-from-plugins-jail.12118/.

I think you'll be able to do audio ripping, but DVD ripping will be more challenging, and blu-ray ripping may be impossible (largely due to the proprietary blu-ray stuff). A search of the forums for DVD ripping and blu-ray ripping yield lots of negatives and maybes. Now, I've never tried this myself, so I won't say it's definitely impossible, but if this is a make-or-break feature for you, make sure you do your research, and test it before you buy anything.

 

[Bidule0hm]

The suppliers are out of stock of the crucial memory

Have you tried the Crucial website directly?

 

[ChrisB]

I've found an alternate supplier fornthe ram so no longer am issue, and to be fair rather than get the components straight away I'm going to get some other jobs done over the weekend that need doing.

Gives me more time to think the solution through.

I was hoping to use the same box to rip the blu rays and dvds etc, but it appears I may have to resort to using a separate box with makemkv for this. I'll have to check the specs of a spare machine I have and see if it's capable enough or I can just throw a bit of ram and a beefier processor at it if not. Leaving the freenas for plex and storage.

I was hoping that I could use the freenas to mirror the two sets of four drives, or am I barking up the wrong tree with that idea?

 

[Nick2253]

I was hoping that I could use the freenas to mirror the two sets of four drives, or am I barking up the wrong tree with that idea?

Again, redundancy != backup. Mirroring is great to provide redundancy in the case of harddrive failure, but it will do nothing if you accidentally delete your data, misconfigure your system, or a single hardware component (like the PSU) decides to take out a whole bunch of your system at once (among many other possible failure scenarios).

If I had 8 drives, I would put those in one RAIDZ2 vdev, and then backup the important data (not necessarily everything, especially if you can "easily" recreate it, like your movie rips) to a second device/service (I currently use CrashPlan to backup my pictures, documents, etc, but not any of my movies/TV shows). If you want more redundancy than that, you could do RAIDZ3, or do the equivalent of RAID10: 4 mirrored vdevs in one zpool (stripped mirrors).

 

[ChrisB]

So, it all turned up, powered up and freenas installed fine.

Tonight will be setting up volumes, datasets and hopefully plex. Though I still dont know what drive configuration to go for. Raidz or mirrors. I was going to run with the Raidz2, but I cant help but feel that a 2 drive redundancy might not be enough, especially as that may take a pretty long time to resilver if a drive went - the likelihood of another going may be high. But then again, if I setup crashplan to store the important stuff like family photos in the cloud, then its just a case of ripping my media again if it does die.

at Raidz2 the drives are showing something like 21TB after formatting, even at 50GB per film, thats over 400 blu rays. My collection is no where near this what so ever, and by the time it does get anywhere near this, storage is likely to be cheaper per GB or the whole setup redundant anyway in fvour of something we dont know about yet. Im wondering if the performance advantage of a mirror and the extra resiliance is worth the storage space sacrifice...

Decisions decisions - or any suggestions....

 

[tvsjr]

The amount of media you have will grow to fit whatever storage array you have. That's why I went with a 36-bay system... future expansion!

You've already been given the correct guidance. RAID isn't backup. Your data should be backed up somewhere else... whether that's a separate array, a pile of BluRays that you have to re-rip (assuming you want to accept the loss of time to re-rip everything), or in the cloud is up to you.

The probability of losing 3 drives simultaneously, and thus losing your RAIDZ2 array, is vanishingly small. If you aren't somewhere that you can get a drive same-day from a big-box store, buy a spare and put it on the shelf. In some ways, striped mirrors is almost worse... you only need to lose 2 drives to lose the array, although it must be 2 specific drives.

If there's a performance reason to run mirrors (like running an ESXi filestore), that's one thing. If not, you're just wasting precious spinning rust.

If you're *really* concerned about it, go RAIDZ3. That gives you another drive of tolerance and still gives you more capacity than mirrors (5 drives vs. 4). Then, make sure you have some sort of backup strategy in play!

 

[Darren Myers]

Tonight will be setting up volumes, datasets and hopefully plex.

You didnt burn in the drives? memtest? Stress the system? These are all key things that need to be done before doing any of that.

 

[ChrisB]

Without wishing to appear totally dumb, why?

If I'm planning on backing up data to the cloud and to a separate nas locallg and running a system with some redundancy built in, then surely if I have faulty drive/sector then I put into action exactly the same process as I would if a drive died?

Is this just something that everyone does because it's always been done that way or am I missing something obvious here?

 

[Darren Myers]

From the front page: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/building-burn-in-and-testing-your-freenas-system.17750/ , idk what backup youre planning on doing whether its cloud or local...but last i checked if your data is corrupt(ed) then backing it up will backup your corrupt(ed) and you'll have a very bad time.

You want to eliminate as many issues as possible, typically harddives are burnt in for days or a week depending on size and how long it takes for the drive size, memory i would be happy with 5-10 passes. Theres no sense in putting data on stuff that isnt tested, yes sure it will work for a while, will you ever experience an error? Maybe, maybe not. But do you want to risk it?

If i can take 1-2 weeks to test all my stuff before putting important stuff on it whether its backed up or not i am going too, i dont want to get my data moved over to it and have a drive die in a week or a month when i could have known about it, or simply burnt it in and watched it fail before hand.

If youre not going to do any kind of burn in, at least make sure youre doing SMART tests both short and long and getting email reports and such.

Best example: You have a family, you love your family, you want to buy a new car....You'd look up the safety rating for that car right? You'd hope that someone made it safe, and someone tested it, alot before going "ok Bob lets market and sell this car". Would you want to drive yourself or your family around in a vehicle that was untested or unsafe?

 

[ChrisB]

I understand the theory, but it seems to me from various reading that a lot of this "burn in" is similar to the monkeys and ladders story. A hangup from times gone by.

How many hundreds of thousands of nas systems are out there like Qnaps and synologys etc with hard drives of varying quality just shoved in and working fine?

There is the odd story of somebody having an issue, but if nas hard drives were inherently prone to failure of they weren't all soak tested, then the Internet would be awash with thousands of people having problems with their basic nas systems.

Ecc memory I can see the point in. Smashing the hell out of a hard drive jist to prove that it can have the hell smashed out of it, seems a bit unnecessary to me. The smart tests yes, military grade passes on the hard drives not so much imho.

The analogy of a car makes no sense. A car is tested, not "every" car. There is no guarantee that every nut and bolt on that new car was tightened just as much as on the car that was tested.

 

[cyberjock]

Ecc memory I can see the point in. Smashing the hell out of a hard drive jist to prove that it can have the hell smashed out of it, seems a bit unnecessary to me. The smart tests yes, military grade passes on the hard drives not so much imho.

Military grade, hell no. I've had to personally do testing for the military (active duty for 8years). Typical testing was about 12 days long. We typically just started the system up on a Monday and checked on it 2 weeks later (unless it failed out cold part-way through).

I will tell you that iXsystems handles alot of RMA for hard drives. We saw a marked change in RMAs when they started doing heavier burn-ins than what they were doing, particularly in the hard drive arena.

So when it comes to burning in hard drives, I'm 100% for it under all circumstances.

From my personal experience, a burnin of about 100 hours of activity (I'm not necessarily talking 100 hours of hardcore iozone benchmarking either) seems to either make it obvious the drive is going to fail from infant mortality, or the drives is likely to last a long time.

 

[TheDubiousDubber]

I totally understand not wanting to do a burn in or stress testing it takes time and delays you getting to what you really want to do. One thing to understand is that there are many different types of users on this forum. Some are casual users with a simple home setup and some are pros setting up production servers that can cost huge money to a company if it were to go down. Some of what is suggested around here is absolutely necessity when it comes to the latter group and transfers over to the casuals as there is reason for doing it and little reason not to other than time. All in all, the suggestions made here are to minimize risk and you just have to figure out how much risk you are willing to take.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Smashing the hell out of a hard drive jist to prove that it can have the hell smashed out of it, seems a bit unnecessary to me.

Another way of looking at it is that some hard drives and RAM sticks have issues when shipped (regular reports on these forums and elsewhere confirm this without question). If you wait until they fail in use, there's a much higher chance that they'll be out of warranty. If you burn them in, either you discover no issues, or your RMA goes through without a hitch.