G'Day Mate!

[ajz]

As you may or may not have understood, greetings from down under. Dodging a few large spiders as I am writing this so excuse any typos :p

Just completed my first FreeNAS build.

Specs:

Intel® Xeon® Processor E3-1225 v3 (8M Cache, 3.20 GHz) (4-Core)
ASUS P9D-WS ATX Workstation MB (Socket 1150) (4 x DDR3 1600MHz) (Intel C226 Chipset) (6 x SATA 6GB/s) (2 x Intel NiCs)
Kingston 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 ECC ( 4 x 8 GB)
Hitachi 4TB Deskstar 64M 7200rpm HDD x 11 (in RAID-Z3)
Fractal Design Newton R3 600W PSU 80+ Platinum Smart Modular
Fractal Design Define XLR2 Full Tower Black
Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SATA 6GB/s SSD ( L2ARC & ZIL)
LSI 9211-8i HBA SAS SATA 8-port PCI-E 6Gb/s RAID Controller Card (Got this cheap off ebay, seems to be working fine till now but I am still a bit suspicious if its genuine. HDDs seem to burst write every second instead of continuous operation)



Here is a pic of the final build. Its not the cleanest but it does the job. The stack on left is running a bit hot cause I think the front intake fans arent blowing in as much air. So I have ordered an extra couple of high airflow fans to help cool things a bit.

The whole setup cost about $5000 ( I know, Australia) and has put a big dent in my savings (as I still am a uni student). Anywho, it seems to coping fine till now. In terms of speed, I havent really had the chance to test it fully as I still have to get some cat6 cable. I did transfer about 3TB data over WiFi (phew!) and scrub ran at about 750MB/s so that okay I think.

 

[someuser]

G'day Mate from Adelaide. Impressive setup. I'm a NAS n00b about to embark on a FreeNAS setup myself but still reading up on it. The biggest challenge I face so far is finding decent suppliers in Australia for a good build. I want to use a Silverstone DS-380 Chassis (PC Case Gear has them and they look amazing) I'm looking to get a Mini-ITX Server board that supports ECC Memory and at least 6 SATA ports but preferably 8. I also want to get the ECC memory to go with it and a low powered Xeon or i3. You think it would be easy but it's not. Where did you buy your stuff? Was it mostly 1 place or all over?

 

[cyberjock]

Everything looks nice.. but the l2arc and zil scare me.. for one, you probably are hurting performance with an l2arc(yes, this is possible and happens more often than not because people don't understand how the l2arc works and when it helps and how it can and does hurt), but your lack of a mirrored ZIL.. wow.. good luck with that. And unless you are using NFS with sync writes, the ZIL is useless.

I wouldn't have gone with an Asus board. It's really not ideal for a FreeNAS box. It's got onboard audio and whatnot that is useless, but will use power forever. Even if you disable it in the BIOS, it will use power.

Beautiful pictures though.

 

[Z300M]

G'Day from a "Ten-pound Pom" now living in the USA. Nice-looking case. Are the drives hot-swappable? I used a "gaming" case and at present have two 5-drive hot-swap drive cages installed in it -- room for two more of those as needed.

 

[ajz]

Thanks for the comments everyone!

@someuser Getting cheap parts can definitely be very tricky in Australia especially if they are non-mainstream parts. Im quite the NAS-noob myself, so I did quite a bit of research on the internet before getting anything. Initially I was going for a mini-ITX build myself but gradually changed my mind as mini-itx parts can be quite expensive and the no of drives you can put in a mini-itx case is quite less in case you want to expand in the future. Tbh, you can research a lot, get the best parts etc but striking the right balance for your needs is quite difficult. I reckon that you should hard-set your budget before hand because before you know the costs start creeping up getting this an that. In hindsight my part selection could have been a bit better like getting a supermicro board like cyberjock said but I am happy with asus for now. Dont obsess over small thing like me eg the drive cage in the middle, fractal design only sell spare parts in europe or america and getting that stupid drive cage here all the way from America cost me 70-80$ as I had to drop-ship it and what not, plus they didnt send screws with it. And now I have to get extra fans as it is overheating. I couldve just gone with a 3x5.25 to 4x3.25 bay which would have had fans preinstalled but anyway. In terms of suppliers, I just used staticice to compare the costs, and I got mine mostly from umart online. I got the ram from eyo technologies and ended up getting the ssd cheap from america in order to offset the costs of the drive cage. While individual products might be cheaper with different dealers, the shipping can cost quite a bit so its better to just combine all with one reasonably prices supplier. Also if you are using 6 or less drives I recommend just going with the C226 chipset as it has 6 SATA 6GBps ports. Lastly, I personally wouldnt venture very far from Hitachi deskstar, deskstarNAS (perfect, but not available in straya last I checked) or ultrastar drives.

@cyberjock I'm not really concerned about power consumed by the audio ports etc because while I tried to minimize the power draw, I wont be running this 24x7, just as needed. Plus as this is a pretty powerful build, I might just add in a gfx card with another boot drive later and use it for gaming or something else. (this is just a maybe but its good to have options haha). In terms of the l2arc and zil, didnt zfs fix the problems of loosing data from the zil? Well its not critical data anyway so I guess it doesnt matter that much and power is pretty stable around here. What are your recommendations though? Currently I just have one ssd.

@Z300M Nah mate its just normal drives. I couldve got backplanes for these but didnt really need em cause I'm never gonna use it.

 

[cyberjock]

In terms of the l2arc and zil, didnt zfs fix the problems of loosing data from the zil?

What problem? The ZIL stores data that isn't in the pool.. so if you lose power there is only one copy of the data that may exist... the data in the ZIL. So no, redundancy has always and will always still be recommended heavily forever.