Freenas New Build By A New Newbie!

[Bernard George]

Hi,

Over the years my pc has grown to where it has has 14 hard drives. Music, pictures & ripped movies. One of the problems I had was my asus motherboard only had 8 sata ports. I had two sata PCI cards where the extra drives connected to only supported drives that are smaller than 2tb's resulting in drives not showing full capacity. I lost data resulting in re-ripping movies. This takes a huge amount of time. I was looking for a solution to keep my data safe when I came across freenas & case to enable me to fit the hard drives into a purpose built case. Xcase can supply all that is needed to make a complete system minus os. I chose,

Custom build 24 bay hot swap storage rackmount server, the rest of the bits are in the attached picture. I know it's not cheap. Any suggestions for doing it cheaper or is it worth while pursuing.
I intend to run freenas on this box so I can stream movies to my western digital WD tv live, various pc's & iPhones using stream to me & air video apps.

I will buy three new drives to add to the freenas build configured in raid-z transferring data to the new build freeing three drives to add to the new build. I know I'll lose some data space in raid-z but with some juggling I should be able to do it?

Is this possible, what have a overlooked, how hard is freenas to run & maintain? I've been building pc's for years, running small business server 2003 to small business server 2012 where I gave up on it as it developed to many problems that I could only fix by reinstalling it, grief! I tried plex media server, it didn't like way my movies were organised meaning I couldn't find most of my movies. What I'm hoping to do is just point another pc at the freenas box. That way I can use my preferred ps3 media server & all my apps will just work as normal. Sorry for the ramble.

Thanks in advance.

Bernard

 

[Ericloewe]

It's a somewhat silly build. The X10SLM+-LN4F has four GbE controllers (three of which will almost certainly go unused).

An X10SL7-F is cheaper than a motherboard plus an LSI SAS 9207, but includes the exact same SAS controller.

Also, avoid RAIDZ1 if you're storing important data - it's been a pain too often for most people's liking. RAIDZ2 is a much safer choice.

 

[danb35]

Completely concur with @Ericloewe's impressions re: motherboard and HBA. How many disks do you plan to install, and in what configuration?

You're going to want to plan your storage fairly carefully, as you can't just expand ZFS volumes willy-nilly. Follow the link in Ericloewe's sig for ZFS basics, aka Cyberjock's guide, to get your head around how ZFS works, and what you can (and can't) do with it. This may change your plans as far as getting data onto your server, and setting up your storage pool.

 

[Bernard George]

Using that case it will give me room to expand over a few years. Using the X10SL7-F motherboard would it allow me to fully populate the 24 bay case I chose? Z2 is using at least 4 hard drives? I'm aware you can't just add drives to zfs volumes. This is all new to me & a bit confusing in parts.

Thanks for the replies

Bernard

 

[danb35]

Using the X10SL7, you may or may not be able to fully populate the case without any additional cards--do you know exactly what the case, and what backplane is included?

Yes, RAIDZ2 requires at least four disks for a vdev, and has two disks' worth of redundancy. Honestly, though I think I generally understand the math behind it, I'm not completely onboard with the "RAID5/RAIDZ1 is dead" train. Perhaps it's because I've rebuilt RAIDZ1 arrays using 2 TB and 3 TB disks on several occasions, without any errors or data loss. But that said, there's no question that RAIDZ2 gives better protection for your data, and disks are pretty cheap.

 

[Bernard George]

There's a choice of two cases,

http://www.xcase.co.uk/rackmount-ca...-single-or-redundant-psu-s-395-00-x-case.html

http://www.xcase.co.uk/rackmount-ca...with-sgpio-backplane-580mm-399-00-x-case.html

Thanks

 

[Ericloewe]

Disregard, see below.

 

[danb35]

Both have an SAS expander in the backplane, which means you just need to get one (or two, for extra bandwidth) SAS reverse-breakout cables to connect 4 (8) individual SAS ports on the motherboard to the single (two) SFF 8087 port(s) on the backplane.

What part of the listing indicates this? I saw "The SGPIO Mini SAS backplane requires 6 8087-8087 cables to connect all 24 drives to your raid card." and thought there was no SAS expander in there. Still trying to figure this part out myself.

 

[Bernard George]

I will ask xcase on Monday what is needed to connect to the backplane, hopefully they'll be back from Christmas holidays.

 

[Ericloewe]

What part of the listing indicates this? I saw "The SGPIO Mini SAS backplane requires 6 8087-8087 cables to connect all 24 drives to your raid card." and thought there was no SAS expander in there. Still trying to figure this part out myself.

That's odd, I must have misread something.
You're absolutely right, will correct that.

OP, you need an SAS expander and/or additional HBAs to run all the drives.

Maybe they also have a backplane with an expander.

 

[jgreco]

Maybe they also have a backplane with an expander.

I don't believe so.

 

[Ericloewe]

I don't believe so.

If they did, I'm not sure I'd trust it much, so I guess it's best to assume they don't.

 

[Bernard George]

I've been in & out of Wikipedia & Google looking up sas expanders, 8087 cables etc! Some of the cards are the same price as the card I 1st listed. Any suggestions for cards that would fulfil the needs, new or 2nd hand?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Ericloewe]

You mean HBA? You have several options:

Supermicro X10SL7-F + Intel RES2SV240 SAS expander (easiest, probably cheapest)
Some other motherboard without the integrated SAS controller + IBM M1015/LSI SAS 9211/LSI SAS 9207 + Intel RES2SV240 (no real advantage over the above, more expensive)
Supermicro X10SL7-F + two M1015s/etc ( a bit more expensive, feels a bit silly but gives you extra bandwidth - not that it matters with HDDs...)
Some other motherboard + three M1015s/etc (not sure why one would do this...)