First NAS - Which Supermicro mainboard should I take?

[Pharmi]

Hello guys,

I have read a lot in the last half year about FreeNas and finally decided not to buy a Synology or something else. Instead I want to build my own NAS, which is from the technical point of view no problem at all.
I have the tools and experience in building PCs... but I have never planned a litte server

What I want and already have (from older systems):

I want to use one SSD - a 120 GB Sandisk as far as I remember
2x 2TB purple WD disks at the beginning
planning to upgrade to 4-6 disks in the next years

I have a bequiet 450 and 550 Straight Power 10 PSU, both should do a great job

And an ATX tower case (Fractal Design Define R5)


What I need:

DDR 4 ECC RAM 8 to 16 GB (optional DDR3)
CPU with GPU
maybe a 2nd network connection (directly to the backup PC)
Supermicro Mainboard

My seller is offering the following models:

Favorite: X11SSH-LN4F
X11SSL-F
X11SSV-Q-O
X11SSM-F
X10SAE
X11SAE
X11SSM
X11SBA
X11SSZ-F

Is the X11SSH-LN4F okay? Which CPU should I buy for it?

Thanks a lot and have nice day!

 

[Constantin]

Have you had a look at the hardware recommendations resource page?

Another resource to consider is the Supermicro X11 board resource page.

 

[Ericloewe]

Unless your needs are really weird, the only logical choice is the X11SSM-F.

 

[Pharmi]

I have read the guide, yes.

At the beginning I was convinced by the X11SM-F.
But then I have realized, that I the X11SSH has an M2 connector
"...it’s very similar to the X11SSM-F. In fact, the only difference is that one ... slot is exchanged for an M.2 connector (2x PCI-e 3.0). "

The price is 250 vs. 290 CHF. And the higher price would be worth it for me.
Cause I could get a cheap M.2 - SSD and safe some money


I am wondering, if there is the situation, that any specific CPU is totally overprived or another model is currently cheaper.

 

[Ericloewe]

The price is 250 vs. 290 CHF. And the higher price would be worth it for me.

It shouldn't be. It's a crippled x2 M.2 slot and the board has two wasted lanes going to what would be the extra NICs on the -LN4F model.
If you want an M.2 SSD, just buy an adapter card.

 

[Pharmi]

Final draft / is this a basic working setup?

Mainboard: Supermicro X11SSM-F
RAM: Kingston 2x 8 GB - KSM24ES8/8ME
CPU: Intel G4600 (BX80677G4600)

SSD (boot): Intenso High Performance SSD - 120GB
HDD: 2x WD 2TB purple 5400 rpm
PSU: BeQuiet 550W (Straight Power 9 or 10)

 

[Yorick]

It shouldn't be. It's a crippled x2 M.2 slot and the board has two wasted lanes going to what would be the extra NICs on the -LN4F model.
If you want an M.2 SSD, just buy an adapter card.

I suppose adapter card is an option. I think it all depends on use case.

If speed matters: I get you. The SSD is for caching, there may be extra 10Gb NICs, the SSM is a great choice.

For a home media server: I’m really glad I got the SSH. USB boot drive was failing, I guess Sandisk ain’t all that after all. A small x2 NVMe is the same price as a USB stick and a good choice here. No addon cards to get in the way of airflow in a small case. X4 wouldn’t have gained me anything, the addon card would just have been one more item to “clutter the build”.

And 2x1Gb is more than my home setup will use on this. Useful for initial population of media library from two PCs, overkill after. I don’t care how many lanes go to the PCIe slots, I don’t intend to use any of them. If I ever add another controller, it won’t need more than 4 lanes I’m assuming.

Unless “home media server” qualifies as “really odd requirements”, I think the SSH is a fine choice for that use case.

For lab use, as a NAS for virtualization, yeah, SSM.

 

[LimeCrusher]

CPU with GPU

No you don't need an iGPU for FreeNAS. The only reason you may want an iGPU is in the hope that the Plex plugin of FreeNAS eventually allows hardware transcoding using Intel QSV. People are working on it but it is not out there yet and is kind of a niche feature.

CPU: Intel G4600 (BX80677G4600)

In my country (we're neighbors), the Pentium G4560 is cheaper and more widely available than the G4600. I am not sure that the extra performance of the G4600 justifies the price bump.

RAM: Kingston 2x 8 GB - KSM24ES8/8ME

You checked that's Unbuffered ECC DDR4 right?

If speed matters: I get you. The SSD is for caching, there may be extra 10Gb NICs, the SSM is a great choice.

I think that the boot SSD is only used by FreeNAS for loading the OS in the RAM at boot and nothing else. No caching then, this is being done by the RAM. Somebody more expert than me could answer that.

X4 wouldn’t have gained me anything, the addon card would just have been one more item to “clutter the build”.

If what I just wrote above is true, then indeed, a PCIe x2 dedicated to the M.2 slot should be enough to do the job thus making a M.2 NVMe SSD an interesting solution as a boot drive and freeing a SATA port.
But it's still crippled. Now Imagine you want to use that port to connect a L2ARC device. Is it really a good idea?

 

[Yorick]

I think that the boot SSD is only used by FreeNAS for loading the OS in the RAM at boot and nothing else. No caching then, this is being done by the RAM. Somebody more expert than me could answer that.

It is. I'll unpack my comment: If the workload is such that sync writes are a thing, and a slog is desired; or caching is beneficial beyond the memory cache ZFS already does, then it can make sense to connect two NVMe SSDs via PCIe expansion slots for that slog/ZIL, or for read cache. Not for booting.

Which wouldn't be a home media server setup, those would be workloads like NFS with sync writes, or DBs. Someone who has that workload will know its characteristics.

The boot drive doesn't need to be fast at all.

If what I just wrote above is true, then indeed, a PCIe x2 dedicated to the M.2 slot should be enough to do the job thus making a M.2 NVMe SSD an interesting solution as a boot drive and freeing a SATA port.
But it's still crippled. Now Imagine you want to use that port to connect a L2ARC device. Is it really a good idea?

Yeah I think it is still a good idea. Because 1) L2ARC gains me nothing if my use case is media streaming or I stick with 2x1Gb and 2) if I start throwing other workloads at the thing that benefit from L2ARC (which, though? Am I building a heavily taxed virtualization lab / database farm in my basement?), I still have two PCIe x 8 and one PCIe x 4 available. I'll need them too, because that 2x1Gb NIC on there won't tax ZFS to the point that an L2ARC/cache makes sense, so I need to go 2x10Gb for starters, and the rest of my environment has to support 10Gb, and the workload I'm using has to push that much. One PCIe x 8 for the NIC, leaves me two slots for NVMe drives.

At which point, maybe, I should have thought of that ahead of time and built for a mini-datacenter rather than a home media server ... see cache/slog comment above. Maybe I want my NICs on separate cards for redundancy, and my NVMe drives as well, which means I need two x8 and two x4 at a minimum. But also maybe, if I'm into THOSE kind of workloads, I should live in a 19" enclosure not a Micro-ATX case, and should have chosen an entirely different board to begin with.

What I am wordily thinking myself towards / through is: This board really is best suited for home media / home backup / home lab use cases, SOHO as well, anything where 2x1Gb isn't a bottleneck. In those environments, giving up one PCIe slot isn't a big deal. I likely won't use any of the slots. For more taxing 2x10Gb (or higher) connections AND workloads that benefit from ZIL or L2ARC, this may not be the right board to begin with, depending on how many PCIe slots I need for redundancy and performance.

 

[Ericloewe]

I think that the boot SSD is only used by FreeNAS for loading the OS in the RAM at boot and nothing else.

When will this line finally die? There is no RAMdisk or similar thing. The OS is loaded like any other. Sure, ARC helps, but the boot device is not virtually read-only.

A slow boot device can easily render the GUI useless as components fail to load. And boot environment manipulations get rather long and painful. And so on...

My point is that there is real value in going with a real SSD instead of USB flash drives. Cheap M.2 PCIe SSDs can fill the niche previously occupied by expensive, unreliable SATA DOMs.

 

[microserf]

Cheap M.2 PCIe SSDs can fill the niche previously occupied by expensive, unreliable SATA DOMs.

Over-provisioned, cheap M.2 PCIe SSDs work well as L2ARCs. I use Supermicro SATA DOMs in a number of servers. They're very reliable.

 

[Yorick]

@microserf This is a mini home server build the OP asks for, no need for L2ARC. I’m shaky on when one is beneficial; I think I’ve understood that at 2x1Gb, it doesn’t do anything for you.

@Ericloewe Thanks ;). I feel validated in my opinion that an x11ssh makes for a fine home/soho nas/miniserver, because of that ability to boot from a cheap m.2 ssd. Certainly not the only board that allows that.

 

[microserf]

@microserf This is a mini home server build the OP asks for, no need for L2ARC. I’m shaky on when one is beneficial; I think I’ve understood that at 2x1Gb, it doesn’t do anything for you.

Depends on the data and usage patterns. I wouldn't suggest using one to start and I'd definitely wait until there's at least 32 GB RAM in the system before considering it.

https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/11.2/zfsprimer.html

 

[Yorick]

@microserf Aye. And more than a 1Gb link, as the drives can saturate that without needing any help. And a use case that’s not streaming or backup, which are both large files, not rapid random access.

Rapid random access, what comes to mind is a DB or a mail server. Nothing a home user would ever touch.

I’d love to hear use cases where people actually needed an L2ARC. Is it all data center stuff where a truenas is a better fit because corporate support? Or are there enthusiasts / hobbyists that have found a use? What’s the application? Link size? How did application performance change?

That’s more out of curiosity. I don’t do anything exciting at home. Streaming, backup. 2x1Gb LAG because I can, not because I need it. That’s it.

 

[microserf]

The M.2 in question is actually just shy of a 2 x 1GB (not bit) link.

@microserfRapid random access, what comes to mind is a DB or a mail server. Nothing a home user would ever touch.

I’d love to hear use cases where people actually needed an L2ARC. Is it all data center stuff where a truenas is a better fit because corporate support? Or are there enthusiasts / hobbyists that have found a use? What’s the application? Link size? How did application performance change?

CalDAV, CardDAV, Radius, LDAP.

 

[Yorick]

@microserf The GB vs Gb was kinda my point: Without a 2x10Gb network link, I'm hard-pressed to see how anything L2ARC helps me. 2x1Gb is the network link available on the boards used for home systems.

RADIUS, LDAP, etc: Data Center, yes, I see the point. Home use - how many users am I authenticating to actually cause a large number of random reads?

For now, I'll stick with thinking that L2ARC is utterly pointless for home use. With a handful of users at best, neither my network nor FreeNAS will be saturating the Gb links found in an enthusiast home ... and don't get me started on WiFi :)

 

[microserf]

First, don't conflate network link speed with ARC/L2ARC speed more than is necessary. Second, don't forget writes.

Off the top of my head ,

Alice is streaming a 20Mbps movie to the TV in the living room and is recording a 15Mbps OTA TV show using Plex . Bob is in his room talking to his girlfriend while his desktop is running an automated backup and streaming his playlist. Carol works from home and is updating NextCloud for the week ahead. Dave is in the backyard smoking a brisket while being recorded from two angles in HD (2 x 16Mbit/s).

The Plex streams are taxing the storage system (light to moderate, depending on fragmentation). If it's being transcoded, the CPU is awake. The backup is taxing the storage system (light to moderate) and might be using an internal db (more storage, random read/write, CPU). Carol is a wildcard but will interrupt the process of smoking brisket (sitting and drinking beer) if things get laggy. Dave is trying to hide from the multi-cam surveilllance system streaming to the NAS (moderate to...depends on stream count).

The 2 x 1Gb/s network is fine. The flying drive heads are getting a workout. Don't upset Dave.

 

[Yorick]

@microserf I feel like we’re taking over the OP’s innocent question about the best motherboard. Continue this elseforum?

 

[Pharmi]

I will order at the weekend the following parts:

Supermicro X11SSM-F
Samsung DDR4 2666MHz 8GB CL19 (M393A1K43BB1-CTD) - ECC and buffered ;)

 

[Yorick]

Enjoy!

Oh. You probably know this, but I didn't, so:

>>
2x 2TB purple WD disks at the beginning
planning to upgrade to 4-6 disks in the next years
>>

That's a mirror I'm assuming, with 2TB usable. Additional disks would be extra vdevs in the pool. It's recommended that each vdev is as near the same size as previous ones as possible, because a pool will stripe across vdevs. So, another mirror, and then maybe a third. You'll get half of your disk capacity.

I really didn't understand that when I started because I was so used to RAID. Of course, you can always copy your 2TB off to a PC, wipe your mirror, build a raidz2 with your 4 or 6 disks, then copy the data back to it. raidz expansion is also not a thing, but may well be by the time you're ready for it. That's in progress, I learned.