BUILD First Build

[kapvu]

Hello All,

I'm new to the forum and been reading up on a lot of post. Thought I share my build and see if i can get any feed back from the community. Please let me know your thoughts and any suggestions would help. I'm really new to FreeNas.

I will be using this NAS mainly to store picture/videos/music/movies/data. I also plan to stream music/movies through other devices also. My whole house is hardwired with cat6e so it will all be hardwired streaming.

I'm looking for the best performance with being a little green if possible.

Build:
Mobo - Asus M5478L-M/USB3 AM3+
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131942

CPU - AMD Athlon II X2 270
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/amd-cpu-adx270ocgmbox

PSU - Seasonic SSR-360GP
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151117

RAM - Kingston 2x8gb Unregistered ECC RAM
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139979

HDD - WD Red 2TB (3 of these)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236343

Case - Fractal Design Define
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811352011

Again any thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[gpsguy]

Expect to hear a number of responses that you need a Supermicro mobo with a fast Intel CPU.

One of the experienced members here (joeschmuck), is using the same motherboard with a slightly different CPU and ECC RAM. I'm also considering buying one (maybe two) of the mobo's from Newegg to upgrade my desktop. I only need one, but given the price, I might buy a spare.

Consider buying a 4th disk and going with RAIDz2. With the larger drive sizes, the odds of a second drive failing (while recovering from one drive failing) increase.

 

[kapvu]

Thanks for the info.

My thoughts are that the NAS box isn't CPU hungry so any dual core cpu would suffice. Why would I need a faster CPU?

I already ordered the mobo so still order different CPU (faster one if needed).

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

I don't think you will get yelled at. The motherboard is known to work and you have ECC memory. So in my opinion you are good to go.

I would also suggest more disks and raidz2. So if you can afford it I would take 6 disks and make raidz2 vdev. Also the 3TB WD Red seems to be the sweet spot in gigabytes/$$ right now.

As for cpu power I think it will be enough for file-serving and light plex-transcoding to ipad/iphone, but probably not 1080p transcoding.

You will probably see a higher power consumption from the AMD system than a comparable Haswell system. But if power is cheap where you live that might justify the much higher cost of the Haswell system.

 

[kapvu]

how fast of cpu do i need to handle 1080p transcoding? i'm streaming to smart TVs, apple tv, ps3.

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

I wish I could tell you exactly. I did some simple testing here:

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/plex-transcoding-performance-initial-measurements.16360/

The Athlon 270 is a bit more powerful than the Core 2 Duo in my test system. But I am not completely sure that it has power enough. My best answer would have to be 'maybe' and it depends on the source material.

As you can see your chip is faster, but not by that much:

Geekbench for the Athlon II 270
Geekbench for the Core 2 Duo E8500

And if you look at something like the i3 4130 then the performance goes up quite a bit. I believe that the i3 will do the job, but I don't know for certain. I have however ordered one and will do some performance testing on it.

The Plex guys are very quiet about transcoding requirements in their wiki. I suspect it's because it varies wildly depending on your source material.

 

[cyberjock]

Keep in mind that ZFS has some beefy processing needs compared to a standard file system. So you have to deal with that too. If you plan to do more than 1 stream at a time I wouldn't try to use an i3.

 

[joeschmuck]

I was asked to chime in on your system since I have the same MB. Your RAM is almost the same as mine, I used the 4GB modules vice the 8GB because I couldn't find proof of compatibility. If you know you are going to only go up to 16GB RAM, I'd recommend you purchase the 4GB modules unless you know someone else who has used them in this MB. If you do buy the ones you listed, I'd like to know how the MemTest86 results turn out (remember to run 3 complete passes). The CPU seems to be fine, hopefully it comes with the new AMD heatsink like the FX line has. It's very quiet and you will never know it's running. Definitely a huge difference from in the past.

Since you have a fairly simple list of requirements I think we can knock this off your list pretty easily...

1) General NAS file serving: Done!
2) Transcoding Video on the Fly: Not Done.

Although you likely have enough processing power to transcode one stream, I don't know of anyone who uses the Plex Transcoding Plugin with great success (I could be wrong) so I would do a search on the forums for a plex thread and ask a few questions about it. If you are ever planning to transcode more than one stream at the same time then before purchasing your CPU, read more about the Plex Plugin. Your best option in my opinion is to migrate and video files into a format which all your equipment can use. For me I use exclusively H.264 MKV files and most at 720p resolution, I do have a few 1080p movies as well. For me 720p is satisfactory for watching a movie on my 65" screen from 15' away. And I'm not telling you how you should do it, it's just my opinion. Having your system hard wired makes a huge difference over WiFi as well.

You say you will have three WD 2TB Red hard drives (good drives in my opinion) but what ZFS setup are you planning? I suspect RAIDZ1 which will give you 3.6TB of usable storage. This is fine until you start storing backups of your computers as this tends to eat up a lot of space. A RAIDZ1 configuration will generally give you better throughput than a RAIDZ2 using slow drives like the WD RED. This is normally not an issue for what you are expecting to do with your system but you should be aware of why some things slow down. If you want to move to 4 hard drives to increase capacity then four of the same drives will give you 5.5 TB of storage in general for a RAIDZ1.

Lets speak about the MB for a few minutes... It is a great MB for the price, no complaints except one... In the BIOS when you setup the boot devices to boot from USB, well it works fine providing you don't pull out the USB drive and move it to another location. The BIOS will revert to hard drive first. It's nuts and I haven't checked for a BIOS upgrade since I purchased mine half a year ago. When you get the MB you will need to tell it you have ECC RAM installed or it won't use it. You will also have a section on what level the ECC RAM should be cycled through. Go with BASIC. This setting is simply how fast the computer will go though the RAM and read it's contents, verify it's good, fix it if something is wrong, and write it back to RAM. I think BASIC setting would ensure you RAM was checked at least once every 24 hours, or in other words it would take up to 24 hours to cycle through all the ram locations assuming you had the slowest RAM and the maximum capacity.

Sorry I jumped around so much but hopefully this will make sense. I'm a bit busy at the house so this took about an hour to type up between all the "fun" I'm having here.

If you have any questions I can help with, please ask.

-Mark

 

[Michael Wulff Nielsen]

As joeschmuck says you are fine for most things but not transcoding. I currently use the Plex transcoding and if you have a setup with different devices from different manufacturers then there is almost nothing you can do to prevent transcoding. Especially if you start using the plex dlna server to serve content.

That being said it all comes down to how you plan to stream your content and what devices you want to stream it to.

 

[joeschmuck]

As joeschmuck says you are fine for most things but not transcoding.

Transcoding is possibly not going to work great is more what I said.

The system may work great but in my opinion it's a hit or miss right now but I haven't tested Plex in FreeNAS 9.2.0-Beta yet either. I'm sure someone has done some testing on how good Plex is running on a FreeNAS machine so it's worth investigating. I use MiniDLNA, something I didn't specifically state in my previous posting but it is part of my tag line. If you do not want to use transcoding then use MiniDLNA. You could actually setup both Plex and MiniDLNA on a single FreeNAS system and then let your smart phone use the Plex DLNA server and your Bluray player use MiniDLNA. The best of both worlds. 16GB RAM is a lot for a home system. Make sure you turn on the tunables setting to make use of the extra RAM.

My opinion is to purchase the parts as listed but take heed of my previous note for the RAM compatibility as a potential issue. If you can afford a better CPU, buy it. I really like my FX-4300 but it's up to you. I wouldn't lie to you and say it's better than the one you picked out because I don't know if the differences would make any considerable contributions to what you want to do with it.

 

[kapvu]

Thanks for all the info. I have looked into the FX series also and wasn't sure if the system would consume more power just to run. Is a 95w or 125w really bad on cost efficiency?

I also want 2x8gb because since the mobo has 4 slots, I may need to increase memory in the future. I read another thread where someone was using the same ram with the same mobo without any issues. I did consider the 4x4gb since it is cheaper.

Currently I have win7 machine that I store movies on and stream it to my ps3/apple tv/xbmc using the built in media server. I am able to play back 1080p without any issues. I'm looking for something similar with the NAS box. I guess the worst case senario would be to continue to stream my PC and when finish, store the downloads on the NAS.

I plan on using RAID 5. Is there a better option? I also plan to create backups on an external HDD every month or so.

I do not plan to keep the movies/tv shoes I download for very long. I'm more concern with backing up and storing home videos/picture/documents.

 

[joeschmuck]

The FX processor shouldn't pull much more power while running under the same scenario/task but it does have more CPU horsepower available when needed. Mine stays idle 99% of the time so power draw for me comes from my hard drives and video card. I want a minimal video card but finding one isn't so easy these days. I think your original choice is fine to be honest but if you could spring a few more bucks, I don't think you would regret it for piece of mind that the CPU is not the bottleneck at all. Also the Retail boxed unit fan is super quiet. I don't know if the Athlon is shipped with this new cooler.

As for the RAM, if you have seen someone else using it then that is good. If you haven't contacted that person specifically then I would do so and ensure that they had enabled ECC RAM in the BIOS because you can install ECC RAM and by default it will run as Non-ECC RAM. I'm not trying to steer you to my suggestion, I only want you to be certain it works in ECC mode.

If you are streaming from your Windoze 7 PC without issue and just using the built in support, I wouldn't expect you to have any issue with streaming from the NAS.

The RAID 5 is not really what FreeNAS supports. FreeNAS supports the ZFS file system but you can create a RAIDZ1 which is the same thing as a RAID 5. You can loose one drive without loosing data. This puts you at 3.6 TB of estimated usable data if using 2TB drives. I'm not sure if you fully understand how the ZFS file system works so you should read up on that because if you ever expect to expand the pool then you are limited to a few ways to do it and you need to do it properly so you don't destroy all your data. Of course backing up all your data to another device is always preferred, or at least the important stuff.

 

[kapvu]

can you provide a link to the same RAM that you use? I see many different 2x4gb ecc kits. Just want to make sure I get the right one. Realistically, I don't see myself ever moving to 32gb of RAM.

 

[joeschmuck]

Here is the exact part I purchased from Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139262
Since it looks to be discontinued you might find it elsewhere or just take a stab at the 8G sticks. It would be nice to find someone who has 8G sticks just to be sure it works since it does cost a lot.