Summerrefill
Cadet
- Joined
- Oct 22, 2019
- Messages
- 2
Greetings everyone. I am in the process of building my first FreeNAS server to store company data and would like to get some opinions on it from those more experienced. I appreciate your help in advance!
To provide a bit of background, I am building this server to store and share data among a small team of 6. We generate around 200-300GB per week on average containing mostly images and videos, but we also create a handful of 3D models which can contain up to hundreds of thousands of tiny files. We are quickly outgrowing our current 4-bay NAS, so after some expedited research I've invested in a retired 36-bay supermicro server for use with FreeNAS.
Here's the current hardware list:
CPU - 2x Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2
Mobo - X9DRD-7LN4F-JBOD
RAM - 128GB ECC DDR3 (8x16GB)
HBA - LSI SAS2308 (IT Mode)
Case - 36 bay supermicro LFF
PSU - 2x PWS-920P-1R
Boot - 32GB Cruzer USB (Also have 128GB and 256GB ADATA SSD's I may use in place)
I received the server and have become familiar with installing and configuring FreeNAS. I am now working on the pool layouts, networking, and file shares:
Pool layouts – For the storage pools I had the idea to create two storage tiers, hot and cold. Hot storage would be a pool of SSDs containing data that was captured/generated within the past 3 months. The Cold storage would then be a pool of HDDs with everything older than 3 months. This is the starting configuration I have in mind:
Hot Storage: 6x 2TB Samsung 860 EVO (3x mirrored vdev pairs)
Cold Storage: 12x 10TB WD Red (2x Raid-Z2 vdevs of 6 disks)
With this configuration I would look to upgrade by purchasing 2x 2TB 860 EVOs to add to the hot storage, and 6x 10TB WD Red to add to the cold storage. I also have some NVME storage already that I was looking to use, but I’m not sure if there would be any performance increase over the SSDs.
Networking – Our workstations are currently on a 10GbE network, so I plan to utilize that with our FreeNAS. I’m looking to purchase a Chelsio T420-BT for this.
File Shares – All of our current workstations use Windows 10, so I plan to set up a SMB share for access to the stored data. Each workstation is joined to our Azure Active Directory for user authentication, but I am not sure if AAD is compatible with FreeNAS. I am open to other options for user auth but I would like to keep it integrated with our existing Microsoft accounts if possible.
Please let me know your thoughts on my system and if you see anything I may have overlooked. Thanks!
To provide a bit of background, I am building this server to store and share data among a small team of 6. We generate around 200-300GB per week on average containing mostly images and videos, but we also create a handful of 3D models which can contain up to hundreds of thousands of tiny files. We are quickly outgrowing our current 4-bay NAS, so after some expedited research I've invested in a retired 36-bay supermicro server for use with FreeNAS.
Here's the current hardware list:
CPU - 2x Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2
Mobo - X9DRD-7LN4F-JBOD
RAM - 128GB ECC DDR3 (8x16GB)
HBA - LSI SAS2308 (IT Mode)
Case - 36 bay supermicro LFF
PSU - 2x PWS-920P-1R
Boot - 32GB Cruzer USB (Also have 128GB and 256GB ADATA SSD's I may use in place)
I received the server and have become familiar with installing and configuring FreeNAS. I am now working on the pool layouts, networking, and file shares:
Pool layouts – For the storage pools I had the idea to create two storage tiers, hot and cold. Hot storage would be a pool of SSDs containing data that was captured/generated within the past 3 months. The Cold storage would then be a pool of HDDs with everything older than 3 months. This is the starting configuration I have in mind:
Hot Storage: 6x 2TB Samsung 860 EVO (3x mirrored vdev pairs)
Cold Storage: 12x 10TB WD Red (2x Raid-Z2 vdevs of 6 disks)
With this configuration I would look to upgrade by purchasing 2x 2TB 860 EVOs to add to the hot storage, and 6x 10TB WD Red to add to the cold storage. I also have some NVME storage already that I was looking to use, but I’m not sure if there would be any performance increase over the SSDs.
Networking – Our workstations are currently on a 10GbE network, so I plan to utilize that with our FreeNAS. I’m looking to purchase a Chelsio T420-BT for this.
File Shares – All of our current workstations use Windows 10, so I plan to set up a SMB share for access to the stored data. Each workstation is joined to our Azure Active Directory for user authentication, but I am not sure if AAD is compatible with FreeNAS. I am open to other options for user auth but I would like to keep it integrated with our existing Microsoft accounts if possible.
Please let me know your thoughts on my system and if you see anything I may have overlooked. Thanks!