Compatibility question about a nas I'm building.

[kujinke]

I just read that 8Gig ram is the minimum for a ZFS storage.
general purpose is having reduced wattage consumption.
so the mobo will be : Supermicro X9SBAA-F - http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/X9/X9SBAA-F.cfm
it is a atom S1260 based mobo .. im gonna add 8 gigs of ram and a IBM M1015 raid card on the pcie. gonna buy two 4 bay hot-swappable 3.5" HDD cages and 8 WD 3TB RED HDDs and i will be building the body my self.
the question is will the mobo recognize and fit well with the freenas freebsd os.. because I read here: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,59088.0.html
that this guy bought the same mobo and he had some difficulties with installing pfsense which is a freebsd based firewall. it seems to be a drivers related problems.
so before making any decision i must know that my mobo will be working good with freenas.

 

[tingo]

Why don't you buy another motherboard, preferably one that has room to grow? (More RAM)
Then you avoid the uneasy feeling that it might not work...

 

[ProtoSD]

Why don't you buy another motherboard, preferably one that has room to grow? (More RAM)
Then you avoid the uneasy feeling that it might not work...

+1

It already looks like your planning to disregard the specs regarding the amount of RAM per TB since you plan to have 8x 3TB and your motherboard can only take 8GB. Get a different motherboard and get AT LEAST 16GB of RAM to start.

 

[survive]

Hi kujinke,

Another reason this is simply a bad idea.....

It looks like that board has 4 SATA ports. How do you plan on adding the other 4, via the PCI slot? That's not a good plan...odds are just 1 Red drive could move enough data to max out the PCI bus so if the lack of RAM doesn't kill off your performance the lack of drive bandwidth surely will.

Don't take this the wrong way though. We aren't trashing your choice of hardware & it's great that you are asking first. Give us some specifics about what you want and we will gladly make some suggestions that should work great in a FreeNAS environment. It's better for everyone if you come back once you got it built & rave about how fast it is instead of looking for why it's working so poorly.

-Will