FreeNAS system architecture advice

[marcelsan]

Hello everyone.
Me and a colleague are entering the FreeNAS world and would appreciate if you guys could provide us with some tips on the following:

We currently have this hardware components:

1. Motherboard: Supermicro Motherboard Micro ATX DDR3 1600 LGA 1150 Motherboards X10SLL-F-O
2. Processor: Pentium G3220 BX80646G3220
3. RAM: Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3/DDR3L-1600MT/s (PC3-12800) DR x8 ECC UDIMM Server Memory CT2KIT102472BD160B/CT2CP102472BD160B
4. HDs:

1x Seagate 2TB Barracuda LP 7200 RPM (ST2000DM001-9YN164)
1x Seagate 2TB Barracuda LP 7200 RPM (Unknown)
1x WD Red 3TB 5400 RPM 64MB Cache (WD30EFRX)
1x Seagate 3TB Barracuda LP 7200 RPM (Unknown)

We still need to purchase the Case, PSU and a no-break. We live in Brazil and we want to build a low-cost FreeNAS for storing lossless music files using all drives with the following premises:

1. Have a reliable and redundant system for storing data, preferring storage capacity over performance.
2. Have a possibility to expand the size capacity of the system.
3. Have an stable power current to avoid the unstable Brazilian current power system.

After reading the forums and the official FreeNAS documentation, we intend to build the following architecture:

1 ZPool containing 1 VDev with 2x 2TB and 2x 3TB drives in a RAIDZ1 configuration.

(We will be replacing the 2TB drives with 3TB Red Drives ASAP)

We do not have sufficient knowledge to evaluate whether we should use ZIL, L2ARC or other system configurations.

Our questions are:
Is the proposed architecture compatible with what we intend do do? Are there any recommendations for the case, PSU and no-break that would support at least 8x 3TB drives?

Thanks in advance for your generous help.

 

[religiouslyconfused]

I think you really don't need a ZIL or L2ARC for the system you are building right now. It really makes sense if you have like 64 GB of RAM or more. Then again Haswell is only capable of 32 GB of ram, so I think you are fine. A lot of people use Desktop cases for 8 drives like the Fractal R4 or R5, and you can get a nice desktop case with good airflow. It really all depends if you want hot swap drive bays or not. The thing is is that FreeNAS you cannot expand the pools once you set it up, but you can replace drives for bigger ones gradually as you have the chance. Once you set a vdev you it is rather fixed in size. You can however backup and rebuild the pool as this is not like unRAID. You can have multiple vdevs though.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/proper-power-supply-sizing-guidance.38811/

Motherboard and RAM is fine but you are limited to 6 disks on the standard board, but you can expand to an IBM M1015 flashed to IT mode later on.

I think it all looks good.

 

[SweetAndLow]

I think you really don't need a ZIL or L2ARC for the system you are building right now. It really makes sense if you have like 64 GB of RAM or more. Then again Haswell is only capable of 32 GB of ram, so I think you are fine. A lot of people use Desktop cases for 8 drives like the Fractal R4 or R5, and you can get a nice desktop case with good airflow. It really all depends if you want hot swap drive bays or not. The thing is is that FreeNAS you cannot expand the pools once you set it up, but you can replace drives for bigger ones gradually as you have the chance. Once you set a vdev you it is rather fixed in size. You can however backup and rebuild the pool as this is not like unRAID. You can have multiple vdevs though.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/proper-power-supply-sizing-guidance.38811/

Motherboard and RAM is fine but you are limited to 6 disks on the standard board, but you can expand to an IBM M1015 flashed to IT mode later on.

I think it all looks good.

I like what you said but want to clarify on sentence. You said you can't expand a pool, this is incorrect. You can expand a pool by adding a vdev. What you where referring to was you can't expand a vdev.

 

[religiouslyconfused]

Thank you for clarifying.

 

[danb35]

Agreed with @religiouslyconfused that nothing in your given use case calls for an SLOG (what you're calling a ZIL) or an L2ARC. You wouldn't benefit from either, and in fact they'd probably slow down performance. I'm sure you're already aware that 2 x 2 TB + 2 x 3 TB in RAIDZ will be limited by the capacity of the smallest disk, so that would have a net capacity of about 6 TB, or 5.4 TiB. Once you replace the 2 TB disks with 3 TB disks, it will grow to 9 TB / 8.1 TiB.

I've read a lot of bad things about Seagate 3 TB drives.

 

[jgreco]

Agreed with I've read a lot of bad things about Seagate 3 TB drives.

Yes, but, on the other hand, the 3TB drives affected by that mostly seem to be the ones [URL='http://www.computerworld.com/article/2500090/data-center/impact-of-hard-drive-shortage-to-linger-through-2013.html']produced in the immediate aftermath of the Thailand flooding[/URL] and I would not expect the ones today to be problematic. However, of the ones manufactured in that time period, I think we saw like a ~~50% failure rate. I would not expect the ones they're shipping today to be a problem, but no harm in avoiding them, either.

 

[danb35]

OTOH, it sounds like these are drives already on hand, not newly-purchased for this build, so who knows how old they are. But with that said, I haven't paid a great lot of attention to the issue, as I don't have 3 TB Seagates, and won't likely be buying any 3 TB drives any time soon.

@Marcel Filippelli, also be aware that lots of folks here will advise strongly against RAIDZ1 with disks larger than 1 TB, as the numbers say there's a pretty significant chance of a data error while rebuilding an array leading to data corruption. I've rebuilt RAIDZ1 arrays with 2 TB disks without issue, but YMMV.

 

[marcelsan]

Thank you all for your replies.

After what you @danb35 commented on the RAIDZ1 not being the optimal configuration, it got us wondering. Which RAID configuration would we benefit the most?

In Brazil, only Corsair, EVGA, Thermaltake and Antec PSU Brands are available. We are looking for an 750W 80Plus Gold PSU. Which of those available brands would you guys recommend? What about UPS brands?

 

[danb35]

Which RAID configuration would we benefit the most?

It's always a trade-off between capacity and redundancy. Most folks here seem to go with RAIDZ2. The concern with RAIDZ1 is that once one disk fails, you have no redundancy. If there's then a read error on one of the remaining disks, though ZFS will know the data is corrupted (because of checksums), it won't have any way to correct it. If that read error happens to come in the middle of a critical piece of metadata, the results could be catastrophic. This is different from traditional RAID5 only in that you'll know what's corrupted under ZFS; with RAID5 you have no way of knowing that.

OTOH, RAIDZ1 gives you n - 1 disks' worth of capacity, while RAIDZ2 gives you n - 2.

Can't really advise on PSU brands. For a UPS, some brands that are well-regarded include APC, Eaton, and CyberPower.

 

[Bidule0hm]

In Brazil, only Corsair, EVGA, Thermaltake and Antec PSU Brands are available. We are looking for an 750W 80Plus Gold PSU. Which of those available brands would you guys recommend? What about UPS brands?

I'd recommend SeaSonic and EVGA. Antec was great but I didn't read Antec PSU reviews since a few years so I don't know if they are still good.

 

[religiouslyconfused]

Corsair makes some good PSU's and my personal desktop uses a Corsair PSU and I love it.

 

[jgreco]

I'd recommend SeaSonic and EVGA. Antec was great but I didn't read Antec PSU reviews since a few years so I don't know if they are still good.

Antec doesn't make their PSU's. Last I heard they were being manufactured by Fortron Source.

Corsair makes some good PSU's and my personal desktop uses a Corsair PSU and I love it.

Corsair doesn't make their PSU's. They are rebranding Seasonics and Channel Well, I believe.

Also I believe Fortron Source is making a lot of the lower end EVGA supplies, and of course Thermaltake doesn't make their own PSU's either.

What you probably want to do is to take any proposed manufacturer and model, and then do some research on the OEM that actually manufactured it, and see how well it has worked out for other people.

 

[Bidule0hm]

Corsair makes some good PSU's

Not so good, I've buyed a Corsair CX-500 for my desktop and I was disappointed to see that it uses CapXon caps instead of the good ones. They may have cut some others corners too but I didn't disassembled it to see the details.

 

[jgreco]

Not so good, I've buyed a Corsair CX-500 for my desktop and I was disappointed to see that it uses CapXon caps instead of the good ones. They may have cut some others corners too but I didn't disassembled it to see the details.

And sadly (as @Bidule0hm knows, but for the sake of the rest of the audience) the only way to actually know whether or not a given PSU is a quality one is to disassemble the little devil and look. For example, Fortron Source is well known for making some atrocious power supplies, as evidenced by the small pile of PSU modules sitting here dead, but they apparently also make some really good stuff as well.

The takeaway here is that you can't buy an "Antec" or "Corsair" power supply and even be guaranteed who actually makes it, and who makes it isn't a perfect indicator of quality either, as it is perfectly possible for a label such as Antec to call up a manufacturer like Fortron, and say "I'd like a cost-reduced version of this very good PSU design you have."

 

[marcelsan]

Thank you all for your replies.

Actually I found the EATON 5E1200iUSB UPS and a SeaSonic 550W G series SSR-550RM PSU selling over Brazilian websites.

I'll probably get those since products from both these brands are scarce here.

 

[religiouslyconfused]

I've had an antec power supply fail on me.