FreeNAS build for home files & folders + media storage backup and Plex server plugin

Status
Not open for further replies.

Digitaldreams

Explorer
Joined
Mar 7, 2017
Messages
80
Hello all!

So I'm new to FreeNAS. After a failed attempt to run it on a legacy rig I had (10 year old eVGA nForce 680i SLI mobo using the PheonixAward BIOS with a Core2 Duo and 8 GB RAM. It wouldn't make it through POST) I think I'm going to go the route of a new build.

This really needs to be a budget build as money is a huge factor and my main uses are file/media backup and Plex server. I don't foresee there being more than 2 streams with transcoding at a time. So I've put together the following main components as I will be reusing a PSU and case. I know it's non-ECC and that it's consumer grade stuff. What I want to know is will these suffice for my uses? Thanks to everyone in advance!


Intel Pentium G4400 Skylake Dual-Core 3.3 GHz LGA 1151 65W BX80662G4400
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117625&ignorebbr=1

ASRock Z170 Pro4S LGA 1151 Intel Z170 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157636&ignorebbr=1

G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2400 (PC4 19200) Intel Z170 Platform / Intel X99 Platform Desktop Memory Model F4-2400C15D-16GVB
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820232173&ignorebbr=1

(4x) WD Red 3TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD30EFRX
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236344
 

melloa

Wizard
Joined
May 22, 2016
Messages
1,749
The big difference is always the cost for ECC memory ... If you can afford, try another motherboard with a i3. With 12 TiB pool you would be fine with 16 GB RAM, so consider ECC as a better option. If you can't afford (I couldn't at the time I built mine), start with 8 GB RAM and plan for another 8 GB RAM later. It's always a game of planning to get to your final goal, leaving slots open for the upgrades. Check the resources tab for more info on hardware (if you haven't yet).
 

Digitaldreams

Explorer
Joined
Mar 7, 2017
Messages
80
I've looked for mobos including ATX and mATX that support ECC and has 4 memory slots future upgrades and some sort of onboard video output but I can't seem to find anything in the $100 range. I don't need the onboard video but I'd rather not have to install one if I don't have to. I'm not clear on the software versus hardware RAID recommendation but I've limited my searches to mobo's that have onboard RAID (like the one I linked). I don't know if that's considered hardware or software.

If anyone can link some cheaper ECC mobo's, I'd be happy to look. The lowest cost Supermicro's I've found were between $150 and $200 which is really more than I can spend right now.
 

melloa

Wizard
Joined
May 22, 2016
Messages
1,749
'm not clear on the software versus hardware RAID recommendation

FreeNAS uses ZFS, so you shouldn't use hardware RAID. Pick a motherboard that has regular SATA ports. ECC is a great safeguard for your transient data between memory <> disk. I don't use it as my data is static and I'm the only user with multiple copies of my data (mostly videos), but that was my personal choice.

On a side note, don't save money on your chassis. Get one that has been approved by the community regarding ventilation. You don't want your disks to get hot ;)
 

demon

Contributor
Joined
Dec 6, 2014
Messages
117
Yeah, you won't find anything server class (BMC, ECC, etc.) in the sub-$100 range. That said, ECC is a thing you should care about. Once you start putting data on your NAS, you'll depend more upon it. ECC is one of those things where you don't "need" it until you do - once the memory gets to be a few years old and starts to show some age, single-bit errors can creep in, and with ZFS scrubs they can cause pool-destroying corruption with no prior indication, until FreeNAS hocks up a lung saying your pool suddenly is inaccessible. Once it gets some age on it, you'll be glad you spent a few extra bucks on it. There's a reason it's so strongly recommended.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA25V3VK1850 <- $205
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018CZVY2W <- $96 per stick, RAM off SuperMicro's QVL

As far as "RAID", you don't want motherboard RAID, or any RAID, for ZFS. Period. End paragraph. You want individual drives directly accessible to ZFS.
 

Digitaldreams

Explorer
Joined
Mar 7, 2017
Messages
80
Okay, that's what I figured. The hard drives would be setup as SATA in the BIOS and I'd configure RAID-Z1 after the install. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Also, would the following parts then fulfill the ECC and storage recommendation?

SUPERMICRO X11SSM-F-B Supermicro X11SSM-F-B LGA1151 Intel C236 DDR4 SATA3 and USB3.0 V and 2GbE MicroATX Motherboard
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA25V3VK1850

Intel Core i3-6100 3M 3.7 GHz LGA 1151 BX80662I36100 Desktop Processor
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...Intel_Core_i3-6100-_-2MN-0004-00002-_-Product

Kingston ValueRAM kvr21e15d8/16 GB (1 x 16GB) DDR4-2133 Memory KVR21E15D8
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820242215

4x) WD Red 3TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD30EFRX
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236344
 

melloa

Wizard
Joined
May 22, 2016
Messages
1,749

demon

Contributor
Joined
Dec 6, 2014
Messages
117
Okay, that's what I figured. The hard drives would be setup as SATA in the BIOS and I'd configure RAID-Z1 after the install. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Right, that's part of the pool provisioning. You'll do that within the FreeNAS UI.

Also, would the following parts then fulfill the ECC and storage recommendation?

SUPERMICRO X11SSM-F-B Supermicro X11SSM-F-B LGA1151 Intel C236 DDR4 SATA3 and USB3.0 V and 2GbE MicroATX Motherboard
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA25V3VK1850

Intel Core i3-6100 3M 3.7 GHz LGA 1151 BX80662I36100 Desktop Processor
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...Intel_Core_i3-6100-_-2MN-0004-00002-_-Product

Kingston ValueRAM kvr21e15d8/16 GB (1 x 16GB) DDR4-2133 Memory KVR21E15D8
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820242215

4x) WD Red 3TB NAS Hard Disk Drive - 5400 RPM Class SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD30EFRX
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236344

I would heartily *discourage* you from using Kingston RAM. If you search around, you'll find that Kingston has a serious reputation problem because they've sold different (lesser quality) products under the same model numbers - so people on these forums will strenuously recommend you not use them. Samsung, Hynix, Micron/Crucial, sure, but not Kingston. Also, as mentioned, those DIMMs are not on SuperMicro's QVL (i.e., they have *not* been tested by the manufacturer with that board). Buying off vendor QVLs is definitely recommended. You could use this 16GB Crucial part, which is available for a similar price:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017UGK94S

It is explicitly off the vendor QVL, so it's guaranteed to work with that board.

Edit: Also, you could happily use the Skylake Pentium G4400 CPU with this board - the G4400 does work with the C23x chipsets, and it *does* support ECC, with an ECC-capable PCH like the C236. The main difference would be you'd only have 2 cores with 1 thread per core, while an i3 would bump you up to 2 cores with 2 threads per core.
 
Last edited:

Digitaldreams

Explorer
Joined
Mar 7, 2017
Messages
80
Right, that's part of the pool provisioning. You'll do that within the FreeNAS UI.



I would heartily *discourage* you from using Kingston RAM. If you search around, you'll find that Kingston has a serious reputation problem because they've sold different (lesser quality) products under the same model numbers - so people on these forums will strenuously recommend you not use them. Samsung, Hynix, Micron/Crucial, sure, but not Kingston. Also, as mentioned, those DIMMs are not on SuperMicro's QVL (i.e., they have *not* been tested by the manufacturer with that board). Buying off vendor QVLs is definitely recommended. You could use this 16GB Crucial part, which is available for a similar price:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017UGK94S

It is explicitly off the vendor QVL, so it's guaranteed to work with that board.

Edit: Also, you could happily use the Skylake Pentium G4400 CPU with this board - the G4400 does work with the C23x chipsets, and it *does* support ECC, with an ECC-capable PCH like the C236. The main difference would be you'd only have 2 cores with 1 thread per core, while an i3 would bump you up to 2 cores with 2 threads per core.
Awesome info on the CPU. Thanks so much for the assistance. I'm still working on swallowing the fact I have to spend for more money. What strikes me is that from the back ups I currently have, I do the recall ever having to deal with an issue where my data just corrupts. I might just not be understanding the real difference in what freeNAS is or ZFS.

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk
 

demon

Contributor
Joined
Dec 6, 2014
Messages
117
Awesome info on the CPU. Thanks so much for the assistance. I'm still working on swallowing the fact I have to spend for more money. What strikes me is that from the back ups I currently have, I do the recall ever having to deal with an issue where my data just corrupts. I might just not be understanding the real difference in what freeNAS is or ZFS.

Yeah, that's the thing that a lot of people don't understand - ZFS is a very, very different conception of what a filesystem is than a normal filesystem (ext4, NTFS, UFS, HFS+, etc.). It's somewhat more database-like, and it's very dependent on checksumming, which is how its self-healing works.

Bits can (and do) randomly get flipped or just misread (modern disks' areal density is stupidly high), firmware bugs can cause occasional spray writes (data getting written in... unexpected places), etc. Typical filesystems make zero effort to ensure your actual data remains intact, though - once the data is written to the block device, it's assumed that "oh yeah, that'll be the same as what I wrote when I come back to read it, no problem!", which is not always an entirely accurate assumption.

ZFS uses a periodic full readback of ALL of the data in your storage pool - that thing I've called a scrub (and if you've read the docs, you might have heard it referenced). Every time a scrub is run, every block in the filesystem is read back, checksummed, and compared against the checksum stored in its parent block. As your system's memory ages, it can become less reliable - the DRAM cells can wear out and become stuck, or other chips and circuitry in the RAM DIMM might occasionally forward a bit incorrectly due to various issues that can occur. ECC provides a way for the CPU and the OS to know about this when it happens, and (in the case of single-bit errors) to fix it.

With ZFS, since it's regularly reading your entire filesystem back (and writing back to it if it detects errors, or what it thinks are errors), one flipped bit can cause it to try to "fix" a block that doesn't need fixing... which can end up trashing blocks which it then thinks it's "fixing". If this happens to structural blocks instead of data blocks, eventually that silent corruption can get bad enough that the pool is too damaged to read. Also, those scrubs? That is ZFS's primary defense (along with point-in-time rollbacks for crash recovery, like a database) against data corruption. You know fsck, right? Guess what - ZFS doesn't have a concept of fsck. If the pool is corrupted, and ZFS can't do a point-in-time rollback, your entire storage pool - and all the data it contains - is gone.

That's why ECC matters with ZFS. That's why people who've gone the non-ECC route have showed up here looking for help, only to be told "yeah, your data is gone, sorry". Hence why, if you're gonna spend the money to build a storage appliance - which would seem to imply the data you're putting on there kinda matters to you - coughing up the extra dough for ECC when using ZFS can mean the difference between keeping and losing all that data.

(Not trying to insult you here. It's just that these things have happened, and people - like myself - will tell you this because we don't want you to get bit by it. ZFS makes certain assumptions about its platform, and if you go assuming that they don't count for you, things will not go well - maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, but when you least expect it.)
 

gpsguy

Active Member
Joined
Jan 22, 2012
Messages
4,472
If I had the time, I'd love to build a Supermicro system like you've described. I'm playing with the Plex DVR beta (already had a SiliconDust HDHomeRun) and need something with more horsepower for transcoding.

This morning I ordered a HPE ProLiant ML10 Gen 9 for $200+tax+shipping

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5038747&CatId=329

It lacks some features, like an iLO and needs a special dongle for video (has display ports)

http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/11012-hpe-proliant-ml10-gen9/?p=120983

And, once the warranty expires, you can't download drivers, etc. from HP.

But, the price was very appealing.

[QUOTE="Digitaldreams, post: 354599, member: 71527"
SUPERMICRO X11SSM-F-B Supermicro X11SSM-F-B LGA1151 Intel C236 DDR4 SATA3 and USB3.0 V and 2GbE MicroATX Motherboard

Intel Core i3-6100 3M 3.7 GHz LGA 1151 BX80662I36100 Desktop Processor
[/QUOTE]
 

Digitaldreams

Explorer
Joined
Mar 7, 2017
Messages
80
If I had the time, I'd love to build a Supermicro system like you've described. I'm playing with the Plex DVR beta (already had a SiliconDust HDHomeRun) and need something with more horsepower for transcoding.

This morning I ordered a HPE ProLiant ML10 Gen 9 for $200+tax+shipping

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5038747&CatId=329

It lacks some features, like an iLO and needs a special dongle for video (has display ports)

http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/11012-hpe-proliant-ml10-gen9/?p=120983

And, once the warranty expires, you can't download drivers, etc. from HP.

But, the price was very appealing.

[QUOTE="Digitaldreams, post: 354599, member: 71527"
SUPERMICRO X11SSM-F-B Supermicro X11SSM-F-B LGA1151 Intel C236 DDR4 SATA3 and USB3.0 V and 2GbE MicroATX Motherboard

Intel Core i3-6100 3M 3.7 GHz LGA 1151 BX80662I36100 Desktop Processor
[/QUOTE]


That price is VERY appealing. From the specs, it didn't look like ECC was supported.
 

Digitaldreams

Explorer
Joined
Mar 7, 2017
Messages
80
Sorry, double post.
 

demon

Contributor
Joined
Dec 6, 2014
Messages
117
If I had the time, I'd love to build a Supermicro system like you've described. I'm playing with the Plex DVR beta (already had a SiliconDust HDHomeRun) and need something with more horsepower for transcoding.

This morning I ordered a HPE ProLiant ML10 Gen 9 for $200+tax+shipping

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5038747&CatId=329

It lacks some features, like an iLO and needs a special dongle for video (has display ports)

http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/11012-hpe-proliant-ml10-gen9/?p=120983

And, once the warranty expires, you can't download drivers, etc. from HP.

But, the price was very appealing.

[QUOTE="Digitaldreams, post: 354599, member: 71527"
SUPERMICRO X11SSM-F-B Supermicro X11SSM-F-B LGA1151 Intel C236 DDR4 SATA3 and USB3.0 V and 2GbE MicroATX Motherboard

Intel Core i3-6100 3M 3.7 GHz LGA 1151 BX80662I36100 Desktop Processor

I've not used one myself, but I've heard they're a good option. That sounds fair. Hopefully that'll work out well for you.
 

Digitaldreams

Explorer
Joined
Mar 7, 2017
Messages
80
I've not used one myself, but I've heard they're a good option. That sounds fair. Hopefully that'll work out well for you.

Talking about ECC, the RAM is purchased separately? Does the board support ECC?
 

Digitaldreams

Explorer
Joined
Mar 7, 2017
Messages
80
If I had the time, I'd love to build a Supermicro system like you've described. I'm playing with the Plex DVR beta (already had a SiliconDust HDHomeRun) and need something with more horsepower for transcoding.

This morning I ordered a HPE ProLiant ML10 Gen 9 for $200+tax+shipping

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5038747&CatId=329

It lacks some features, like an iLO and needs a special dongle for video (has display ports)

http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/11012-hpe-proliant-ml10-gen9/?p=120983

And, once the warranty expires, you can't download drivers, etc. from HP.

But, the price was very appealing.

[QUOTE="Digitaldreams, post: 354599, member: 71527"
SUPERMICRO X11SSM-F-B Supermicro X11SSM-F-B LGA1151 Intel C236 DDR4 SATA3 and USB3.0 V and 2GbE MicroATX Motherboard

Intel Core i3-6100 3M 3.7 GHz LGA 1151 BX80662I36100 Desktop Processor
[/QUOTE]


What exactly does the HPE ProLiant ML10 Gen 9 include? Do I have to buy the RAM separately? Does it support ECC? Those would be my big questions because the price is great.
 

demon

Contributor
Joined
Dec 6, 2014
Messages
117
Talking about ECC, the RAM is purchased separately? Does the board support ECC?
That's my understanding. You should be able to find documentation online indicating what type of RAM DIMMs it expects, though it'll probably recommend OEM RAM kits, which do tend to be expensive. If you search on Amazon or NewEgg for the FRU/product IDs, you should be able to find compatible equivalents, probably made by the same manufacturer.
 

Digitaldreams

Explorer
Joined
Mar 7, 2017
Messages
80
That's my understanding. You should be able to find documentation online indicating what type of RAM DIMMs it expects, though it'll probably recommend OEM RAM kits, which do tend to be expensive. If you search on Amazon or NewEgg for the FRU/product IDs, you should be able to find compatible equivalents, probably made by the same manufacturer.

What I don't see is where in the specs it says ECC is supported.
 

gpsguy

Active Member
Joined
Jan 22, 2012
Messages
4,472
It requires ECC RAM. Do a Google search for "ML 10 Gen 9 quick specs". In the PDF it says non-ECC is not supported. ECC is. Sorry, I can't link to stuff from my phone.
 

Digitaldreams

Explorer
Joined
Mar 7, 2017
Messages
80
It requires ECC RAM. Do a Google search for "ML 10 Gen 9 quick specs". In the PDF it says non-ECC is not supported. ECC is. Sorry, I can't link to stuff from my phone.

Awesome, thank you. I found it. I may be just missing it somewhere, but I can't find the mobo's SATA transfer speed listed anywhere. It just says Intel RST SATA RAID and that it supports RAID 0,1,5,10 and 6 drives.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top