Efficient NAS Build

[dbanck]

I've been spending the last few days looking for hardware with good performance and less power consumption.

This is my current idea of a build:

Processor: Intel® Core™ i3-2120T (35W!)
Motherboard: Asus P8H77-I
Memory: Corsair DIMM 8 GB DDR3-1333 (CMX8GX3M2A1333C9) or Kingston HyperX DIMM 8 GB DDR3-1333 (KHX1333C9D3B1K2/8G) or Corsair DIMM 16 GB DDR3-1333 (CMX16GX3M2A1333C9)
Case: Lian Li PC-Q08B or Lian Li PC-Q25B
PSU: LC-Power Pro-Line LC7300 V2.3 Silver Shield 300W or bequiet! Pure Power L7-300W or FSP Fortron/Source FSP250-60EGA(90) 250W ATX 2.3
HDD: (4x or 6x) Samsung HD204UI 2 TB or Seagate ST2000DM001 2 TB

Power consumption should be max. ~150W.

What do you think?

Some questions:

• Since I can't expand the storage later on easily, I better go with 6 drives now, right?
• I read somewhere that FreeNAS supports encryption in the latest version. Do you know how much that will affect performance?
• And recommendations for a good Intel PCI-E NIC?

Thanks a lot for your help!

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

any Intel PCI-e NIC should serve you great. You can pick them up really cheap which is also awesome. You shouldn't use 150W when idling, I bet it will be lower. If your going RAIDZ or RAIDZ2 I would get all the drives you plan on having now. If you just want a bunch of mirrors, 2 mirrors now, and add another later would be fine.

Ohh and the more RAM the better =]

 

[dbanck]

I've found a cheap and promising Intel NIC.
So I'll buy all 6 drives and 16 GB RAM for best RAID Z2 performance.

Any feedback about the full disk encryption performance?

 

[paleoN]

Any feedback about the full disk encryption performance?

It won't make it into 8.3.0.

 

[mende21]

Your power consumption would be much lower than 150w. I have a g540 (65w), 8gb ram, four case fans, four hard drives, and a 300w bronze power supply and I idle at 36w and run at 44w at the wall when streaming a movie.

 

[jimmythesaint]

any Intel PCI-e NIC should serve you great. You can pick them up really cheap which is also awesome. You shouldn't use 150W when idling, I bet it will be lower. If your going RAIDZ or RAIDZ2 I would get all the drives you plan on having now. If you just want a bunch of mirrors, 2 mirrors now, and add another later would be fine.

Ohh and the more RAM the better =]

Is there any reason to use an addon NIC when there is one integrated into the system board?

 

[dbanck]

Your power consumption would be much lower than 150w. I have a g540 (65w), 8gb ram, four case fans, four hard drives, and a 300w bronze power supply and I idle at 36w and run at 44w at the wall when streaming a movie.

That's great! Less power consumption is always better. I'll measure it myself, once I build the system.

Is there any reason to use an addon NIC when there is one integrated into the system board?

Because the Realtek 8111F nic of the asus board isn't as good supported as an intel nic. I like spending 10 bucks more for an intel nic instead of having a lot of issues with the realtek card.

 

[Daisuke]

Have you looked at Supermicro X7SPA-HF-D525-O Intel Atom D525 1.8GHz motherboard? Dual Intel NIC's. My NAS runs very smooth on it.

 

[dbanck]

Have you looked at Supermicro X7SPA-HF-D525-O Intel Atom D525 1.8GHz motherboard? Dual Intel NIC's. My NAS runs very smooth on it.

It only supports up to 4 GB memory :/

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

It only supports up to 4 GB memory :/

You can get 2*4GB of RAM in the D525 based supermicros. The below link is the one I (and many others on newegg) have gotten working
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148345

 

[dbanck]

Mh, the atom cpu has much less power consumption: http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/129/Intel_Atom_D525_vs_Intel_Core_i3_i3-2120T.html
But also just 1/5 of the power of the i3. Since I want to encrypt my disks, more cpu power seems better to me.