Critique my 8-drive FreeNAS build

[Pheran]

That's an older-ish model, though, the F3. It still has the ADDA fan that everyone on the internet (except the guy from Anandtech, though he may have caught an older ball bearing unit in newer FDB packaging) seems to say is a ball bearing fan. It's about a year old by now

Huh? That review explicitly states that this model has the Jamicon fan, not the previous ADDA. There are pictures of it.

 

[Ericloewe]

The Jamicon fan was sometimes used instead of the ADDA fan. Note that it clearly says "Dual Ball Bearing".

 

[cyberjock]

If you are going with 8x4TB drives, why would you mix between two vendors? That's double the chances of a firmware bug or other problem wiping out 4 of your disks. If 4 of your disks in a RAIDZ2 fail, that's a total loss of the zpool.

If you go with all the same brand, it's an all or none. But you have only 1 brand/model to worry about, so it's an all or none with one model.

Risk analysis suggests you are far better off sticking with 1 brand and model than mixing and matching, unless you plan to have multiple models spread out such that the failure of a given brand/model does not result in a loss of the zpool. So if you have RAIDZ3 you'd need each brand to have no more than 3 disks in a zpool, and no more than 2 in a zpool if you want to ensure you at least have some redundancy if things go badly.

I will never understand the logic with mixing and matching brands while simultaneously not accounting for the fact that the number of disk a brand will have exceeds the ability to recover with redundancy. Seems totally illogical and excessively risky to me.

 

[diedrichg]

The term vendor is being misused. What the original suggestion, I believe, was meant to advise was to purchase your drives from multiple online and/or brick and mortar stores. This is in an effort to mix drives from different production lines and to avoid multiple simultaneous drive failures.

As for drive brand and model, no I too would not mix a pool with WD, Seagate and HGST drives. I also would not mix WD Green and Red drives because of the differing firmware but that's just my opinion.

 

[cyberjock]

As for drive brand and model, no I too would not mix a pool with WD, Seagate and HGST drives. I also would not mix WD Green and Red drives because of the differing firmware but that's just my opinion.

Ok, but wouldn't the same philosophy that I explained above apply to trying to buy the same model from different vendors (and therefore, hopefully, won't all suffer some fatal design flaw)?

After all, all you are trying to do is avoid a catastrophic failure of the zpool. I'd still argue that if you have a RAIDZ2 of 10 disks, I don't care if I suffer from 8 disks failing instead of 3 disks. All I need is at least 3 disks to fail, and my data is going to have to be restored from backup. At that point it won't matter if it was just 3 disks that failed, or more than 3. I'm already screwed and in the precise situation I was hoping to avoid.

Seems like it would be silly to buy your drives from different sources unless you plan to buy 1 disk from 10 different vendors.

 

[Pheran]

The term vendor is being misused. What the original suggestion, I believe, was meant to advise was to purchase your drives from multiple online and/or brick and mortar stores. This is in an effort to mix drives from different production lines and to avoid multiple simultaneous drive failures.

As for drive brand and model, no I too would not mix a pool with WD, Seagate and HGST drives. I also would not mix WD Green and Red drives because of the differing firmware but that's just my opinion.

That wasn't flatterlight's original suggestion - he explicitly mentioned mixing HGST and WD drives. For what it's worth, I'm totally with cyberjock on this one. I think mixing vendors doesn't make sense, and I also think the whole theory of buying the same model drive from different resellers is dubious, though it least it won't hurt you like mixing actual drive models might.

 

[Pheran]

I'm doing the happy dance because Newegg Business just put the 4TB HGST NAS drives on sale for $145. :)

 

[Darren Myers]

I'm doing the happy dance because Newegg Business just put the 4TB HGST NAS drives on sale for $145. :)

Just saw that, its awesome

 

[Pheran]

OK, all parts are ordered, and I decided to go with a Xeon CPU because I might want to virtualize down the road (if so, I will do it "correctly" by passing through the entire LSI controller with VT-d). For the curious, here's the final build with pricing. I'll probably need to order a few SATA cables of the appropriate length for my case but otherwise this is everything. The additional fan is for adding a second front fan to the case to ensure that all the drive bays are being cooled. I already have a UPS so it's not included in this list.

Fractal Design Define R5 Case: $90
Fractal Design Dynamic GP-14 140mm Fan: $16
SeaSonic S12G-450 450W PSU: $64
Supermicro X10SL7-F Motherboard: $252
Intel Xeon E3-1220V3 CPU: $180
Crucial 32GB ECC DDR3 RAM: $286
2x Sandisk Ultra Fit 32GB USB Flash Drive: $23
8x HGST 4TB NAS Hard Drive: $1208

Total Cost: $2119

This was slightly over my $2000 budget target, but not too badly. I could have easily stayed under by sticking with an i3 CPU or only going with 16GB of RAM, but I'm future-proofing this build as much as I can. I'm hoping to post a photo-diary of the build after this stuff comes in.

Irrelevant anecdote: I got a good laugh when I ordered the Xeon from eBay, as the payment ended up going to "Gem City Dancewear." I guess server processors are standard equipment for ballerinas these days. :p

 

[Ericloewe]

"Gem City Dancewear."

Fiscal obfuscation of the weirdest kind.

 

[diedrichg]

I look forward to hearing your critique of the Define R5! Please post when you finish the build.

 

[HardChargin]

I'm doing the happy dance because Newegg Business just put the 4TB HGST NAS drives on sale for $145. :)

Thanks for this, I too am now doing a happy dance. This saved me a lot of money........or cost me a lot of money....really depends on how you look at it. I just pulled the trigger on my first official FreeNAS build (very similar to yours), so the timing couldn't have been better.

For those interested (Newegg):

Crucial 2x 8GB memory CT2KIT102472BD160B, on sale $137.99 + $10 off promo code:
Memory
+ USD $10 off w/ promo code EMCAVNK55, ends 7/27

also

For the Define R5 case, Fractal Design Dynamic GP-14 140mm Fan, $13.99 + 20% off:
Case Fan
+ 20% off w/ promo code EMCAVKV36, limited offer

 

[Pheran]

For the curious, I've started a new thread covering this build.