FreeNAS Configuration Advice

[Andy Lamp]

Hi,

I want to set up my own private NAS server; I find Synology and QNAP solution to be inferior in hardware specifications (possibly in actual performance) and overly overpriced; but let's take it from step 1 which is the hardware configuration that I've come up with:

NAS Server configuration:

CPU: Intel Xeon 1265 v3 (Haswell based CPU)
RAM: Kingston 8gb x 4 ECC RAM @ 1600 Mhrz
Motherboard: Supermicro X10SAE
NIC: Intel 10gbe x540 PCI-e based
HDD: 8 x WD RED 4TB in RAID5 or RAID6
PSU: Seasonic 520w Fanless
Cooling: Couple of Noctua NF-14 fans for general air-flow as well as Corsair WC H60 for the CPU.

The box is a performance and quality oriented choices of hardware; I'd like also the input on that configuration and comments about the possible (and expected) performance; I know I won't be able to saturate the 10 gbe with these drives but I will be able to saturate 1 Gbit and I also want to be future proof.

Secondly I have a couple of Unix boxes, couple of Windows clients as well as 2 macbook pro's. Probably I want to have one user with unified storage and no complex Quotas just to be able to share all the disks to all the users of the network (though only on the approved machines).

I also tried to find online a good comparison on the performance expectation that I should expect from my FreeNAS setup (assuming of course you have a decent system) but did not find anything conclusive so I'd like an experienced user to give me an input on that. My workload is mostly sequential writes of medium to large files with some random accesses/writes (the drives would be mostly used to archiving and storing data).

Let me know your input on this!

 

[cyberjock]

I don't see any immediate game-killer. I do hope you mean RAIDZ1 or RAIDZ2 instead of RAID5 or RAID6(which are hardware RAID). RAIDZ1/RAID5 is a very bad idea. I'd recommend RAIDZ2 if you value your data.

Secondly, there is no such thing as "sequential writes" for ZFS. There are, but not in the way that you think of them in Windows. ZFS breaks things down into slabs that may or may not be sequential. Be assured that you can expect good performance with your RAM for the uses you have mentioned. :)

For CIFS, expect 200-300MB/sec over the 10Gb(maybe even more, I'm setting the bar lower so you aren't surprised if it "only" performs at that level). NFS might do better. It's tough to say as there's a lot of factors that affect performance.