First FreeNAS Server

[Chris Moore]

If you could get these guys to sell you the chassis cheap, you might be able to move your parts into it:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/583917-B21-HP-PROLIANT-DL380-G7-LFF-CONFIGURE-TO-ORDER-SERVER/132733717066

 

[thatflashcat]

I pulled up a photo of the system board and there are not many capacitors on it. I would look at them all closely but it isn't a guarantee.

I couldn't see the capacitors under the power supplies but all of the rest looked fine, no bulges at the tops or anything out of the ordinary.

Check what the power on delay is set to. Some of these can be set pretty high, like 10 minutes.

I checked in the iLO 3 console and the system power restore setting is minimum delay. I also saw multiple instances of "server reset" in the event log which is likely the power cycle issue I described.

The power supplies are only about $22, and the system board looks to be available for $48, so it might be worth fixing if you don't mind the extra power consumption and heat.

That was my thought. It's worth a shot at least.

If you could get these guys to sell you the chassis cheap, you might be able to move your parts into it:

Perhaps, though having more than 6 drive bays would be a benefit.

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

Perhaps, though having more than 6 drive bays would be a benefit.

Most of the DL380 series can have 16 internal 2.5" bays with an add in drive cage. The kits for that are available mulitple places including eBay. I don't know about 3.5" (LFF) flavor as I never used any of those.

 

[Chris Moore]

Most of the DL380 series can have 16 internal 2.5" bays with an add in drive cage. The kits for that are available mulitple places including eBay. I don't know about 3.5" (LFF) flavor as I never used any of those.

The LFF chassis must not have been very popular because I only found two of them for sale on eBay where there were a lot of the other.

Perhaps, though having more than 6 drive bays would be a benefit.

The system board shape of this system is not a standard, so you will likely not be able to move it to a different system.

If you are in the mood, have a look at this parts list. I put it together today and it should give you a good start on a system.

Supermicro X9SRL-F ATX Motherboard LGA2011 IPMI w/ Heat Sink & I/O Shield
https://www.ebay.com/itm/113216257183
Price: US $189.98

The board supports up to 512GB of RAM.

SAMSUNG 16GB PC3L-12800R DDR3-1600 ECC Registered 1.35V RDIMM
https://www.ebay.com/itm/302606459277
Price: US $44.95 x 4 64GB of RAM with room for another 64 without going to the larger modules.

You can stay with the included fan or get this larger one. I use this model on two of my systems. It is only slightly louder than the Noctua cooler I have on my wife's computer.

Dynatron R27 Side Fan CPU Cooler 3U for Intel Socket LGA2011 (Narrow ILM)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/401284811045
Price: US $39.59

You have a lot of options for CPUs to go in this board, but I recently bought one of these for my system:

Intel Xeon E5-2650 V2 2.6GHz 8-CORE 20MB Cache CPU PROCESSOR SR1A8
https://www.ebay.com/itm/222870480347
Price: US $99.99

Only it was $40 more when I bought it... It works great. Plenty of resources for all the things I am doing.

If you want more, you can get a 10 core model like this:

Intel Xeon Processor E5-2680V2, SR1A6 10-Core 2.80GHz 25MB LGA-2011
https://www.ebay.com/itm/113224096017
Price: US $169.00 - I have one of these also, but the price on these has gone up about $40 since I bought mine.

For the drive controller, I would suggest a SAS controller, there are 4 SCA ports on the system board in addition to the SATA ports, but you will be better off with SAS.

SAS PCI-E 3.0 HBA LSI 9207-8i P20 IT Mode for ZFS FreeNAS unRAID
https://www.ebay.com/itm/162862201664
Price: US $69.55

Set of cables to connect the SAS controller to SATA drives:

Lot of 2 Mini SAS to 4-SATA SFF-8087 Multi-Lane Forward Breakout Internal Cable
https://www.ebay.com/itm/371681252206
Price: US $12.99

I would suggest one of these for the boot drive. It will last as long as the server, if not longer:

Intel 320 SERIES SSD 40GB SATA 2 2.5 Hard Drive SSDSA2CT040G3
https://www.ebay.com/itm/183347748896
Price: US $18.99

Not much more than a USB flash drive, but so much more reliable.

 

[thatflashcat]

If you are in the mood, have a look at this parts list. I put it together today and it should give you a good start on a system.

Thanks so much! I must apologize again for taking so long to reply, I've just started school again for the year and I've been busy.

I'll definitely keep these parts or similar in mind for an upgrade in 6 months or so. Considering the cost, I'm planning to use my current T3500 and switch it to a new case if it's possible (I'm not holding my breath because we all know how proprietary tech is). I'll definitely get a better drive controller though. I know 12 gb of ram isn't much but it should suffice long enough to spread out the cost of the upgraded hardware. Assuming I'm stuck with the stock T3500 case, I'll get an adapter for the 5.25 inch bays like you mentioned before so I'll be set for five drives + ssd boot drive.

 

[Chris Moore]

I'm not holding my breath because we all know how proprietary tech is

Dell, HP and IBM / Lenovo are bad to have proprietary boards and connectors. I have used a T3500 for a NAS before. They make fine systems, but I wouldn't try to move the system board to a different chassis. Too many problems to fix regarding compatibility. The system fan headers for one and the connection to the front panel buttons for turning the system on and the location of the power inputs. If the system I listed above is too much, I can pick some less expensive parts that will still get the job done. Let me know when you are ready and we can find something that will do.

 

[Chris Moore]

I must apologize again for taking so long to reply, I've just started school again for the year and I've been busy.

I am back in school myself. I am supposed to be working math problems right now.

 

[thatflashcat]

I've been thinking about (read procrastinated on :P) this for a while and have a couple more questions. First, would the first motherboard you linked be compatible with the memory from the second build? It's a supermicro x9 series board so I'm guessing it would. https://www.ebay.com/itm/192561781616#rwid https://www.ebay.com/itm/302606459277 Second, I will be making Windows backups to this server in addition to storing data. How would the default lz4 compression handle Windows system images? I imagine at least some of it would be easily compressible data.

Also, once I must thank you for putting time into this for me! @Chris Moore

 

[Chris Moore]

First, would the first motherboard you linked be compatible with the memory from the second build?

No, the X9 is just a generation number and doesn't indicate anything significant about specific capabilities of the board. The system board I linked to above is compatible with Xeon E5 processors and is able to use Registered (RDIMM) memory. The system board you linked to is only compatible with Xeon E3 processors and can only use UDIMM (unbuffered) memory. Very different and the reason I suggest the Xeon E5 systems is because of how inexpensive the RDIMM memory is.

 

[thatflashcat]

No, the X9 is just a generation number and doesn't indicate anything significant about specific capabilities of the board. The system board I linked to above is compatible with Xeon E5 processors and is able to use Registered (RDIMM) memory. The system board you linked to is only compatible with Xeon E3 processors and can only use UDIMM (unbuffered) memory. Very different and the reason I suggest the Xeon E5 systems is because of how inexpensive the RDIMM memory is.

Ah yes, server memory compatibility. I'll go with Xeon E5 then.

Also, can you speak to compression of windows images at all? Edit: I looked into this and .iso files are already compressed, so running lz4 would be pointless. lol

 

[sokoloff]

Also, can you speak to compression of windows images at all? Edit: I looked into this and .iso files are already compressed, so running lz4 would be pointless. lol

In practice, I think you're really selecting between compression and deduplication. There are very few cases where deduplication is better, so the default in reality (and a sane default for most applications) is lz4 compression. Even if much of your data is not compressible, some is. On modern CPUs, the compression is a performance increase in general. (Compression is all integer operations and spinning disks are slow.)

 

[thatflashcat]

In practice, I think you're really selecting between compression and deduplication. There are very few cases where deduplication is better, so the default in reality (and a sane default for most applications) is lz4 compression. Even if much of your data is not compressible, some is. On modern CPUs, the compression is a performance increase in general. (Compression is all integer operations and spinning disks are slow.)

I've researched deduplication some and I don't think it will be helpful for me (I'll just stick with lz4). The system images will already be compressed and I intend to put them on a separate dataset so I *could* disable compression on it entirely, but lz4 is fast enough it's probably not worth it.

 

[thatflashcat]

Ok, here we go:

CPU: https://www.ebay.com/itm/222870480347
Motherboard: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro...0af4756:g:iXUAAOSwxG9b7bwl:rk:2:pf:0#shpCntId
Memory: https://www.ebay.com/itm/302606459277
Controller: https://www.ebay.com/itm/162862201664
Breakout cables: https://www.amazon.com/CableCreatio...pons&keywords=sas+to+sata+breakout+cable&th=1
Boot: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-320-...040G3-SSD-/323548302120?oid=183347748896#rwid
Case: https://www.amazon.com/Rosewill-Rac...d=1542861863&sr=8-3&keywords=server+case&th=1
PSU: https://www.amazon.com/EVGA-Modular...UTF8&qid=1542861936&sr=8-2&keywords=evga+550w
Drives (x5): https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Seagate...-3-5-SATA-6-0GB-s-Enterprise-HDD/153070795097

How does this look? @Chris Moore

I also need a cooler but I'll try to snag one on black friday.

 

[thatflashcat]

Sorry to bump @Chris Moore @sokoloff

 

[Chris Moore]

Sorry to bump @Chris Moore @sokoloff

Sorry I missed this. I must have been distracted by Thanksgiving or something.
I will look at it when I get home so I can follow any links and look at it in detail.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[thatflashcat]

Sorry I missed this. I must have been distracted by Thanksgiving or something.
I will look at it when I get home so I can follow any links and look at it in detail.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

No problem, I'm glad to have your help though!

 

[Chris Moore]

No problem, I'm glad to have your help though!

Motherboard:
Supermicro X9SRL-F LGA2011 For Intel C602/DDR3/SATA3/V&2GbE/ATX Motherboard
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro...DR3-SATA3-V-2GbE-ATX-Motherboard/323576726430

CPU:
Intel SR1A8 CPU | LGA2011 Server Xeon E5-2650v2 | 2.60GHz | 20MB Cache
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-SR1A...eon-E5-2650v2-2-60GHz-20MB-Cache/113412747645

Memory:
SAMSUNG 16GB PC3L-12800R DDR3-1600 ECC Registered 1.35V RDIMM M393B2G70QH0-YK0
https://www.ebay.com/itm/302606459277

Controller:
HP H220 6Gbps SAS PCI-E 3.0 HBA LSI 9205-8i P20 IT Mode From US Ship
https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-H220-6G...9205-8i-P20-IT-Mode-From-US-Ship/192639052923

Breakout cables:
0.5M Mini SAS SFF-8087 36 PIN to 4 SATA 7 P HD Splitter Breakout Cable 10gbps
https://www.ebay.com/itm/0-5M-Mini-...D-Splitter-Breakout-Cable-10gbps/273406702378

Boot:
Intel 320 Series 40GB,Internal,2.5" (SSDSA2CT040G3) SSD
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-320-Series-40GB-Internal-2-5-SSDSA2CT040G3-SSD/323548302120

Case: https://www.amazon.com/Rosewill-Rac...d=1542861863&sr=8-3&keywords=server+case&th=1

That is a horrible case, and yes, I have actually done a build in one before and I hated it.

This Supermicro case is a better option and I still have two of them. It also eliminates the need of a separate power supply because it has hot-swap power supplies integrated and gets you hot swap drive bays.
Better Case:
Supermicro SuperChassis SC933T-R760 3U Black
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro...ack/232848148673?_trksid=p2485497.m4902.l9144

Drives (x5): https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Seagate...-3-5-SATA-6-0GB-s-Enterprise-HDD/153070795097

Those drives are Seagate Constellations at 7200 RPM. I have servers full of them at work and I know from experience that they run a lot hotter (around ten degrees C) hotter than the ones I use, which are like this:

Drives (x5):
SEAGATE ST4000DM000 4TB 5900RPM 64MB SATA 3.5" DESKTOP HARD DRIVE
https://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-SEAGAT...64MB-SATA-3-5-DESKTOP-HARD-DRIVE/123370345269

 

[Chris Moore]

PS. Sorry some of the auctions you pointed out were expired by the time I looked, so I picked replacement items that are available now.
I would offer $150 on that Supermicro chassis and see if they go for it. Their asking is two high in my opinion, but I bought the 48 bay chassis I have for my main NAS for $300, plus shipping, and I think all the prices are a bit too high right now.

 

[Chris Moore]

PS. Don't forget about the CPU cooler...

Dynatron R27 Side Fan CPU Cooler 3U for Intel Socket LGA2011 (Narrow ILM)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/401284811045
Price: US $39.59

 

[thatflashcat]

Motherboard:

That is a horrible case, and yes, I have actually done a build in one before and I hated it.

This Supermicro case is a better option and I still have two of them. It also eliminates the need of a separate power supply because it has hot-swap power supplies integrated and gets you hot swap drive bays.
Better Case:
Supermicro SuperChassis SC933T-R760 3U Black
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro...ack/232848148673?_trksid=p2485497.m4902.l9144

Those drives are Seagate Constellations at 7200 RPM. I have servers full of them at work and I know from experience that they run a lot hotter (around ten degrees C) hotter than the ones I use, which are like this:

Drives (x5):
SEAGATE ST4000DM000 4TB 5900RPM 64MB SATA 3.5" DESKTOP HARD DRIVE
https://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-SEAGAT...64MB-SATA-3-5-DESKTOP-HARD-DRIVE/123370345269

That's a nice case but I already picked up a power supply on black friday. Hotswap is good but I'm not worried about brief downtimes to swap drives. I guess I could look for a regular ATX case on amazon too since I'm never going to have that many drives (and if I did I could replace the case). Again, perhaps not the best for a server but it works.

As for the drives, running cooler is beneficial and the bottleneck will be my network, not the drives themselves, so 5900 rpm looks great.

For the breakout cables, the ones you listed are coming from China which will take far too long to ship to the US. The ones I found on amazon are only a few dollars more. Speaking of this, I know drive controllers are generally recommended but the board you listed has plenty of sata ports on it for my drive configuration. My only thought was that a drive controller could connect directly to the pcie lanes whereas the motherboard sata ports need to run through the chipset first.

And yes, I didn't forget the cooler. I'm considering a noctua cooler on amazon (assuming they support the socket, which I am 99% sure they do).