Does my hardware choices look good?

[23732]

I have decided that I am going to go for a FreeNAS storage solution, for torrents, streaming, NFS and backup.

The components I have chosen is:

Norco 4220 4U case.
Either an Asus P8C WS motherboard and Xeon E3-1225v2 CPU or the i5-3350 CPU, or an Asus P8B-E/4L motherboard and a Xeon E3-1240v2 CPU or an i3-2100 CPU
Corsair TX750M PSU
Kingston 1600MHz 8GB ECC x4
Corsair F80 as boot drive
If I am using the Asus P8Z77-V motherboard, then Intel Pro/1000CT NIC
LSI 9207 8i HBA, if the SAS expander isn't good, then I'll be using only an LSI 9201 16i controller.
INTEL RES2CV240 24-port SAS expander
6x 3TB WD Red harddrives for now.
Cooler Master Seidon 120m CPU cooler

Does the list look fine? I am a bit worried what components I choose. Also because I have seen people who dislikes SAS expanders, but should I be okey with the expander and the components overall?

 

[KMR]

I can't speak to the SAS expander but everything looks decent overall. Is this a personal box or do you have multiple users? If it is just you and your family you could probably go with cheaper components and get the same effect. The PSU looks like it is overkill though.

I would build gradually if I were you. Buy a motherboard that will meet your needs as well as the ECC RAM. Then buy a cheap Pentium processor until you need more grunt. The motherboard should have at least 6 SATA ports so that if you buy 6 drives you really won't need a SAS expander or LSI card. As you need more storage buy the HBA and extra drives.

 

[jgreco]

So presumably you want to be able to go up to 20 drives. The power supply is probably fine but keep an eye on it as you add more drives. Remember hard drives take a *huge* amount of power to spin up.

Is there some reason for the LSI 9207-8i? FreeNAS works very well with the IBM ServeRAID M1015 crossflashed to IT mode, and they're available for about $75 on eBay. You could even purchase several of them to get 24 ports of totally awesome SATA-III capability at a pretty cheap price, certainly a LOT cheaper than an SAS expander and newest generation HBA controller.

SAS expanders are primarily a complication if there are any compatibility problems. Some people believe that they'll cause contention for available I/O, but contemporary hard drives are about 150MB/sec and so you can get approximately a full two dozen drives onto a single SFF8087 before you really max out. It'll be a problem for the latest generation of drives coming out, or if you're mixing SSD's in.

 

[23732]

Thanks for the replies. I have decided to go for the Asus P8B-E/4L motherboard and the Xeon E3-1240v2 CPU, as I am going to use the server for virtualization, and not only FreeNAS, and the motherboard has four NICs. The case I will be using is a Norco 4216. I am going for a TX850M, because it has a 70A 12V rail :D