Check it please.. Australia

[shabtraxx]

Hi guys,

Would appreciate your eyes on this please.

Home NAS, data is always important, storing usual data, media, plex etc. :)

So reading the guides, and living in Australia, hard to get decent hardware within budget, but somewhat seeing some options on ebay etc. at least in the LGA1150 arena, so before i pull the trigger, keen on advise.

• SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.1 USB Flash Drive 16Gb x 2
• Kingwin SSHD HDD 3 bay HotSwap x 2 (already got)
• Western Digital Green 2TB x 5 (already got)
• Supermicro X10SLL-F Motherboard
• Crucial CT102472BD160B 8GB DDR3 x 2
• Intel i3 4160 3.6 GHz CPU
• LSI SAS 9211-8i Card
• 2pc 50CM Mini SAS to SATA FWD Breakout
• Corsair CX450M 450W Semi Modular PSU

Would run RAIDZ2 on the 5 drives, expand as i go.

Finding affordable motherboards are the hard part down here, then memory.

 

[Chris Moore]

SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.1 USB Flash Drive 16Gb x 2

The USB 2.0 flash drives are actually more reliable under constant use. The USB 3.0 drives have been known to overheat and fail early.



Extra effort required if you want to use the newer drives... Better solution is to use a regular (small) SSD.

Would run RAIDZ2 on the 5 drives, expand as i go.

You might not be able to expand the way you were thinking to expand. There are some limitations. What did you have in mind?

 

[shabtraxx]

Interesting cheers re: usb 2.0

CPU/mobo/mem/sas combo ok?

Re: expansion, was thinking keep adding 2TBs to the pool till I run out of sas/sata?

Sorry havn't delved that deep into the guides yet and will need to play with it for a while before it becomes the dependable solution.

Sent from my Pixel 2 using Tapatalk

 

[vegaman]

Depending on how much you want to expand/what else you want to plug in you could go X10SL7-F. You lose a PCIe slot but get an onboard LSI SAS controller - which is a newer 2308 chip instead of the 2008 in the 9211 card (PCIe 3.0 instead of 2.0).
But... since you don't have the CPU and RAM already why not look at the newer gen boards? I.e. https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/#1151 look at the second section with E3-1200 v5/v6 boards.
One of the big things this gets you is DDR4 RAM which should be cheaper, more available and you can go up to 64GB instead of 32GB.

Otherwise it looks good, depending on how much you want to expand you might end up needing a larger PSU, but that should be good for this build.

The expanding thing is the big shortcoming of ZFS for most people - you can't just add drives like other RAID systems. You can either replace each drive with a larger one - one by one and resilver in between - then when all of the drives are the larger capacity your array grows (as long as you have auto-grow set, or you do it manually - I believe export and reimport). Or you make another RAIDZ2 vdev (i.e. 5 more 2TB drives, although 6 is better if you can) and add that to the pool.

If you just add a single drive to the pool you'll kill your redundancy as you're then striping across the RAIDZ2 and a single drive - if that single drive fails your whole pool fails.

Edit: Also I'm from NZ, hardware availability in this area (Supermicro boards, Xeon CPUs, ECC RAM...) isn't great here either, so I just import a lot of it from the US. Unless you're buying a whole lot at once it will come under the threshold to pay import tax and is probably going to be cheaper than anything local anyway.

 

[shabtraxx]

Ah nice, cheers for the tips.

Fine then looks like X11SSL-F or X11SAE-M (funny cheapest ones on ebay are from NZ) with an i3 6100.

Just need some mem and bigger psu, shud be set.

Also just found an old 60gb ssd so there goes the need for usb.

Sent from my Pixel 2 using Tapatalk