Does this build look ok?

[usx8]

Alright, this is my first FreeNAS build and after a bit of research I think I've settled on these parts. I want to double check here though and ask the experts! :)

Build:
Motherboard- Asrock C2550D4I *CPU on board (intel atom)
Memory - ??? ECC 16gb x 1 ddr3 (explained below)
Case- Fractal Design Node 804
HDDs- HGST Deskstar NAS 4tb
PSU - Corsair 800w
Flash Drive 8gb+

Reasoning behind part choice:

The motherboard seems to be made for a NAS type of system, and after some research seemed pretty well supported. Plenty of room to grow. Also includes lovely intel NICs! I already purchased this as the first part in my system

The case was chosen for the size as well as growing room. Since the motherboard can support up to 12 HDD, I wanted a case that could best take advantage of that. Fractal design has a good reputation all around and seems to be a favorite on this site. Cooling seems pretty good but I worry about sound, since this will live in my room.

The hard drives were chosen as I have always had a good experience with Hitachi (HGST now) and they are priced in the same range as the WD reds. Considering 3 of my friends have had WD die within 2 years, and both my dad and I have 8+ year old Hitachi drives still running I've decided to work with these instead.

The PSU is just a fill in until I have the money to get a nice gold rated 500w, this is being bought across a few months so I should be able to swing it before the NAS is built, but just as a backup.​

Context/Purpose/Use of NAS

I'll be using this NAS for storing pictures, movies, videos, music, etc. The NAS will also eventually be configured to run as a seedbox or store/download torrents. I would like to set it up to be accessible over the internet (from an outside network), as this would break my dependence on other systems (google drive) and be immensely helpful as a student. There will be multiple users, but no more than 6. Media may not seem like an issue, but for example between my brothers, myself and my dad we share over 1.5tb of music across different discs. There are also hundreds of DVDs at my house I would like to back up and have a digital copy of, so the ability to grow and expand is huge. I want to have a server that I feel secure about and I feel is stable, but I cant afford to throw endless amounts of money at this.​

Questions that I have:

1. I cannot for the life of me find any memory for this. I would like to use 16gb modules as this board supports 64gb, and at best this NAS will have 48TB of storage (4tb x 12). While I don't think the server will ever get that high, I would rather be limited by practicality than expandability here. If I go with 8gb modules then I would be locked into 32 as the max. I know the board supports 64gb, its all over the advertising and in the manual, but when I tried looking at the system compatibility tool on crucial's page it shows the board as only supporting 32gb. Any ideas here? Another note here, I was having a difficult time finding ANY 16gb modules, so I'm having trouble ball parking the price. If the price is absurd, then I'm sure the server would be just fine with a little less storage and 8gb x 4.

2. I've been thinking that a RAIDZ2 zpool would be best. This will give me 2 disk failure protection as well as the ability to add all the way up to 10 disks with max performance. While the motherboard supports 12, I think 10 used will be plenty. (this is how much the case supports as well) However, I wont have the money to get 4 4tb hard drives all at once (the minimum number for RAIDZ2 as I understand it). I've seen a solution that involves using "filler" drives and upgrading the vdev later (ie. 1tb drives to 4tb), so the number of disks in the vdev is still the same, is this a viable option? Is this the best set up, or would it be better to go with a different level? (biggest issue/worry)

3. I know that hard drive heat isn't too major of an issue anymore, but I'd like reassurance. I think with the open airflow design of the case and a few well aimed fans the system will be fine, but given that the drives I've chosen run at 7200 RPM as opposed to the standard 5400 RPM I'd like to be sure.

4. My motherboard has 3 NIC total, should I run 2 in LACP for better speeds? Or is it not worth the hassle? Getting a hold of the rest of the hardware to support it (ie. switch with LACP support) wouldn't be too difficult (as far as I can tell), as I'm already "renovating" the network in my house right now. But will I actually notice any performance boosts?

5. Small issue here, with say 4 or 6 drives how loud will the NAS be when not in use/heavy use, say at night. It's going to have to live in my room next to/near where I sleep so I'd like to know if i need to try to soundproof the case at all. If anyone has any experience with the Node 804 or the Node series in general I'd love to hear about it!​

Hopefully there's not that many issues! I've tried to do my homework and get as far as I can on my own but its time to ask and make sure I'm headed in the right direction. Any help is awesome! Sorry for the length but I wanted to be sure I gave as much info as I could so that I can get good help!

 

[DKarnov]

The PSU is serious overkill, but you already know that.

Fractal Design cases are plenty quiet, especially if you run the fans at 7 volts. The Node 804 lets you add 2 or 3 fans to the PSU/HDD side of the case, which along with the PSU fan can be made plenty cool and quiet. In fact, depending on the vintage, that 800W PSU may be the most noisy thing in the build. Don't run the mobo side entirely without fans, as the fanless Atom board does need some forced ventilation.

Some people have reported issues with using the Marvell-driven SATA ports on this board. Using just the Intel ones limits you to six drives. SATA2 vs SATA3 is not relevant. If you want more drives you can always thrown in an IBM 1015.

With the Avoton, I would get 4 sticks of Crucial 8GB ECC and call it good enough. There's like one company that makes unbuffered 16GB sticks and I'm not sure I'd bet my money on them.

The Avoton doesn't save you a ton of money or power over a socketed board. It'd be one thing if you were sticking to the Mini-ITX form factor, but you're not. If you're concerned about future expansion, you could get one of the socketed Supermicro mATX boards (I don't know them well enough to recommend a specific one, I think it's the X10SL7-F-O that's popular here) and a low-end i3, and if you find yourself in the future needing more processing power, you could throw a peppier Xeon in there.

I don't have a good answer to your HDD price/storage issue, beyond 'save up a little more.'

 

[usx8]

I had forgot about running fans at 7 volt! Duh. And I know the PSU is overkill which is why I inted to switch it out ASAP. I had been thinking about a passive psu, that way there would only be case fans and HDD noise. I had been looking at the supermicro mATX (I think the one you recommended) but it's a bit out of my price range I think, and I had originally intended to go Mini-ITX. The case isn't finalized and I've been trying to find a case that supports 6+ drives (preferably 8) in a Mini-itx form factor, since having a small, quiet build is important to me, but the node offered everything in a bit larger of a package so it got the go ahead for now.

 

[usx8]

After looking at fanless PSUs, I think I'l still just go with a nice 500w gold PSU. The fanless design is just too expensive in my opinion, money better spent on storage space.

 

[Ericloewe]

Avoton + 16GB UDIMMs is more expensive than Xeon E5 + 8GB RDIMMs (or UDIMMs), so go with that if you need 64GB+ of RAM.

 

[usx8]

Yeah. I've pretty well settled on using the 8gb ones for a total of 32gb. By the time I'd need that much ram I would have needed to upgrade the cpu and motherboard anyway. Thanks for the input though, I hadn't thought of it that way

 

[marbus90]

even w/ 16GB RDIMMs the Xeon E5 is still cheaper and has a heck of a lot more processing power. also Haswells usually idle pretty low, I guess that also applies to socket 2011-3 systems. I've watched my E3-1225v3 w/ IGP in use go below 2W in idle - but when I need the power, it boosts up to 3.6GHz singlecore, 3.5GHz dualcore and 3.4GHz quadcore from 3.2GHz baseclock.

Personally I don't see that many applications for the Avotons, also due to that shiny 12port board of which half won't work w/ FreeNAS. you can probably get the 2port Marvell to work nice, but that's it.

 

[Ericloewe]

even w/ 16GB RDIMMs the Xeon E5 is still cheaper and has a heck of a lot more processing power. also Haswells usually idle pretty low, I guess that also applies to socket 2011-3 systems. I've watched my E3-1225v3 w/ IGP in use go below 2W in idle - but when I need the power, it boosts up to 3.6GHz singlecore, 3.5GHz dualcore and 3.4GHz quadcore from 3.2GHz baseclock.

Personally I don't see that many applications for the Avotons, also due to that shiny 12port board of which half won't work w/ FreeNAS. you can probably get the 2port Marvell to work nice, but that's it.

If Intel added decent PCI-e connectivity, a motherboard with onboard LSI SAS 2308 (or 3008) would make for a rather impressive miniITX thing.

 

[usx8]

Alright, I went ahead and looked at the other options, and I think that I might be able to swing/ might be better to go with a motherboard and cpu. I would have to start out with an i3 though, and get a xeon later. My friend just upgraded from a haswell i3 so I can get that off of him pretty cheap and save some money too. If I do decide to go with this option, I'm not sure which motherboard would be best, after looking at the hardware recommendations and looking on newegg I found these 2 boards
Supermicro MBD-x10SL7-F-O
Supermicro MBD-x10SLL-F-O
The second board is about $50 cheaper (and not the one recommended in the hardware guide) but I cant seem to tell why, anyone know? Would these boards be ok?

 

[marbus90]

The SL7 does have an additional SAS controller for further 8 HDD-ports. It would be cheaper to buy that board instead buying the SLL and a M1015 HBA. When you're fine w/ 6 HDDs, check those boards out: X10SLL+-F, X10SLM-F and X10SLM+-F sometimes one of them is on sale, there isn't much difference for Joe Homeuser.

 

[usx8]

Oh ok, got it. I I figured it was something to do with the expansion lanes or another controller in board but I couldn't find it in the specs. Looking at that that's sounding like a better plan than the avaton to me, simply because of how expandable it is. The extra cpu power won't be bad to have, but I don't know if I'll use it. I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it though! An i3 4130 should work with it, right?

 

[Ericloewe]

The X10SLL-F is similar to the X10SLL+-F and is the cheapest motherboard we can let you buy in good conscience.
Important differences are two mismatched GbE controllers on the - vs two matched Intel i210s on the +- and the fact that the +- lists support for Micron (Crucial) RAM, which is a good idea to have if Samsung and Hynix are not an option.

The latter is, in my opinion, very important if you want to buy the popular Crucial RAM (otherwise Supermicro might go "nah, use recommended RAM and talk to us again if your problem persists". The former is not that important in theory, but some people have reported problems with board that have the i210 + i217 setup, whereas nobody's complained about boards with two i210s.

The i3 4130 will work fine.

 

[Jailer]

The extra cpu power won't be bad to have, but I don't know if I'll use it. I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it though!

I was in the same boat as you looking at the AVATON boards when I was contemplating my build. Ultimately I followed a path that is true to my personality that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess. :D

I went with a E3 1240-V3 and now I'm very glad I did. You see my freenas box is now waayyy more powerful than my aging desktop. I'm in the process of backing up my blu ray collection but the transcoding using handbrake was taking forever even on my overclocked E8400. I was curious just how much faster my new server was than my desktop so I set up virtualbox and installed xp 64 to take advantage of the multiple cores in my server for transcoding. My desktop transcodes at about 6FPS, the XP 64 in virtualbox transcodes at 30+ FPS. The time difference is 6+ hours on the desktop and about 1.5 hours on the virtual XP.

tl;dr - plan your build for any possible future use you may have not just your immediate need.

 

[usx8]

Alright, after taking suggestions this is the revised build!

Motherboard- Supermicro x10Sl7-f-0
CPU- intel i3 4130 (later on a xeon)
Memory- 16gb (2x8gb) crucial ram
Hard Drives- HGST Deskstar NAS 4tb drives
PSU- Corsair 800w (to be replaced by a higher efficiency lower wattage model ASAP)
Case- Fractal design node 804 (may change this, cases aren't too hard to research and I think i can handle this! haha)

Everything seem to be in order?

 

[Jailer]

That looks like an excellent build and will serve you well.