Hardware suggestion

adfafd

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 13, 2021
Messages
11
Hi,

I am planning to build myself a nas. I am planning to store all my photos and videos there. These file are very important to me and I don't want to lose any of it. I will also run ubuntu server on it. I prob will run Plex on it but nothing crazy.

Here is a list of parts I am considering.
CPU: AMD 5600x
Memory: Supermicro 16GB DDR4-2666 PC4-21300 CL19 Single Channel ECC Memory Module MEM-DR416L-HL01 - Green
Graphic card: any graphic card (considering gt730/gt710)
Motherboard: ASRock X570M PRO4 AMD AM4 microATX Motherboard
Power: Seasonic Core GX-550
Startup SSD: Samsung 980 500gb

Storage DIsk: WD easystore 14tb hard drive x 6

I am thinking setting them into 2 disk groups in mirror set. 3 disks in each group. and within each group, they will be RAIDz1.

This will give me about 28tb of storage, which should be enough for 3-4 years for me. and it will give me 2 times read speed, and withstand 3 disks in a group failure without data loss.

My questions is:
1. Is this hardware setup going to work at all?

2. Is this hardware good enough for like 8-10 years? I will not be doing any heavy duty task on it.

3. Is this kind of disk raid setup good enough to prevent data loss even when rebuilding? I have read article and post about they lose data even in RAIDz2. If not what's optimal way of setting these 6 disk up?

4. Is there any suggestion on case? I am looking for a case that's minimal and take minimum amount of space on the ground. (I want a case to fit minimum of 8x 3.5HDD for further upgradability)

Any suggestion would be helpful for me to build and setup my first NAS. Thanks!

[mod note: removed tiny font formatting -jg]
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Patrick M. Hausen

Hall of Famer
Joined
Nov 25, 2013
Messages
7,737
I am thinking setting them into 2 disk groups in mirror set. 3 disks in each group. and within each group, they will be RAIDz1.
Either RAIDZ1 or mirror ...

I would discourage RAIDZ1 with disks this large. If it's mostly "storage" and IOPS are not important, I'd suggest a 6 disk wide RAIDZ2.

Second, have you checked if the mainboard and CPU combination can take ECC memory at all? This looks like a gaming mainboard. I would not use it. Better get a server board with Intel NICs on board and IPMI. You won't even need a graphics card in that case. Server boards come with simple graphics included. Sufficient for the text console.
 

NugentS

MVP
Joined
Apr 16, 2020
Messages
2,943
Have you shucked those drives or are you planning on using USB?
1. Yes - its not perfect as its consumer hardware. But it should work
2. Maybe, maybe not
3. Not how I would do it. I would do RAIDZ2 or possibly even RAIDZ3
 

Constantin

Vampire Pig
Joined
May 19, 2017
Messages
1,827
Second the z2 or z3 and suggestion to use server grade hardware. Massive Ryzen rigs don’t really make sense for simple storage.

One of my favorite storage-oriented motherboards is the 2 core x10sdv-2c-7tp4f. It has a on board LSI HBA, two Satadom slots, dual 10GbE SFP+, two PCIe expansion slots, ECC for up to 128GB RAM, etc. All for about $550. If I had been smarter, I would have purchased that board instead of the more expensive one I got in the end. Only downside is the flex form factor, which may limit your case options somewhat.

Lastly, I’d go with a single storage pool for your use case. That limits the space lost to parity. I run a 8-drive pool here and most disks are approaching the 24khr mark. If you can, consider using he-filled drives since they tend to use less power and hence produce less heat as well.
 
Last edited:

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
Welcome to the FreeNAS and TrueNAS forums.

These forums are for the discussion of the iXsystems software and hardware known as "TrueNAS" (formerly FreeNAS). This is an appliance-style software package that runs on your hardware, or hardware sold by iXsystems.

If you are looking to run Ubuntu Server, you are in the wrong place. Ubuntu has its own forums, or, optionally, you are also quite welcome to discuss this in our Off-Topic forum here. The users here are quite knowledgeable about ZFS, so you WILL get better advice about ZFS here than most other places. You are most certainly encouraged to take advantage of that.

I'm a bit confused by

2 disk groups in mirror set. 3 disks in each group. and within each group, they will be RAIDz1.

I suggest you look at


to familiarize yourself with ZFS. What you refer to as a "group" might be a vdev or a pool, but neither of these are able to be a "mirror set".

It is entirely possible to have two pools that are periodically replicated to each other, and these could both be RAIDZ1. This is unusual and somewhat wasteful, but has some benefits to protect against catastrophe. It would be better to have two separate machines though. Nothing you have described is able to withstand the sort of

withstand 3 disks in a group failure without data loss.

protection you mention, however. For that, you need RAIDZ3.

The ideal design for a ZFS pool is one where you can retain redundancy even in light of multiple failures, such as an entire hard drive failing, and then also running into additional read errors on the other disks while rebuilding. This is why RAIDZ2 is commonly considered to be the minimum standard for important pools.

RAIDZ2 on a properly designed system is unlikely to lose any data, but, stuff happens. If your power supply is hit by a surge from a lightning strike, or your server's cooling fans fail, these are physical events that damage the server in ways that the software cannot prevent damage from happening.

Those of us who are truly concerned for our data run stuff like RAIDZ3 with a warm spare disk on standby, and replicate it to another NAS thousands of miles away, that has a similar pool design.

As for your choice of hardware, most inexpensive PC hardware is designed for a three year lifecycle, meaning that the manufacturers are mainly concerned that it get out of the warranty coverage period. Server mainboards may be designed for somewhat longer, five to seven years, depending on the components a manufacturer uses, and enterprise grade servers can often last a decade or more. However, these are not components you have easy access to. We do have guides here that discuss some of the better components, including also how to design things such as selecting a proper power supply such that you are not stressing it out, but for a system you want to survive ten or more years, do expect that things will fail.

Hard drives are considered to be geriatric once they pass maybe 50,000 or 60,000 spun-up hours, so expect that they will need replacing at some point maybe five to seven years in.
 

adfafd

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 13, 2021
Messages
11
Second, have you checked if the mainboard and CPU combination can take ECC memory at all? This looks like a gaming mainboard. I would not use it. Better get a server board with Intel NICs on board and IPMI. You won't even need a graphics card in that case. Server boards come with simple graphics included. Sufficient for the text console.
Yea on the motherboard's website, it stated the support of ECC memory.
AMD Ryzen CPU does not have official ECC support. However, from the research I have done, AMD left motherboard to determine the support of ECC. That being said, this combination will have ECC support, since the motherboard have ECC support.

Do you have any suggestions on server motherboard for this cpu then? I don't know much about server boards....

AMD Ryzen CPU seems to be the only CPU to go to, given that Xeon platform is very expensive and the intel i3-9300(support ECC) is even more pricer than this CPU but give out less performance. Any thoughts?
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
I don't know much about server boards

The options for server boards on Ryzen are very sparse.

Server boards are different from other boards in sort of the same way gaming boards are different from desktop boards. They are simply optimized for the task, with non-Realtek ethernets, non-garbage PCIe slot options, maybe IPMI/BMC options, ECC support, etc. It is possible to cobble together stuff from a solid full ATX desktop board, which may be a reasonable alternative starting point if you do not need IPMI, because even if the board has Realtek ethernets, a full size ATX board probably has a few slots free to correct the shortcomings.
 

adfafd

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 13, 2021
Messages
11
Have you shucked those drives or are you planning on using USB?
I am going to shuck these drives and use it over SATA interface.

I think RAIDz3 would be good choice? Lets say one drive failed and I put a new hdd in, then another two fails during the rebuild, I still won't lose any data. What's the chance of me losing more than two hdd during rebuild?
 

adfafd

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 13, 2021
Messages
11
One of my favorite storage-oriented motherboards is the 2 core x10sdv-2c-7tp4f.
Thanks for the suggestions. I see it has 2 core 4 threads and 4 SATA3. Since I am going to run Truenas on it as well as a ubuntu server as VM on it, would it be a bit underpowered? Also this board seems to pack lots of functionality that I don't seem to know how to use these...

Simple storage would provide backup in case of hard drive failure? If not that would be a no-go for me since this is way more storage space I need.
 

adfafd

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 13, 2021
Messages
11
The options for server boards on Ryzen are very sparse.

Server boards are different from other boards in sort of the same way gaming boards are different from desktop boards. They are simply optimized for the task, with non-Realtek ethernets, non-garbage PCIe slot options, maybe IPMI/BMC options, ECC support, etc. It is possible to cobble together stuff from a solid full ATX desktop board, which may be a reasonable alternative starting point if you do not need IPMI, because even if the board has Realtek ethernets, a full size ATX board probably has a few slots free to correct the shortcomings.
Yea, There are very little Ryzen server boards. I do find couple on ASRock Rock Ryzen board, however, they are super expensive and very rare to find and buy.

The board I send you does use Giga PHY Intel® I211AT which is a good thing. In the future if I need more than 1GB speed that's provided by mobo, I will buy an extra intel 10GB network card. The only thing I need now is ECC support for data safety which is provided by this mobo too. And it is a micro-atx so it only have two PCIe. One will be occupied by the graphic card, and the other one will be either network card or a sas card if I really need more than 8 SATA drive. Should I just go with this motherboard? lol Really struggling here.

Also, would 550w power supply be enough to power this kind of setup? There is a deal going on right now hahah just would like to grab the deal and settle. Thanks
 

NugentS

MVP
Joined
Apr 16, 2020
Messages
2,943
NAS doesn't need a lot of CPU - look at all the somewhat underwhelming commercial NAS's on the market. However when you start adding VM's / Jails etc then you start needing more grunt.
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
Joined
May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
Yea, There are very little Ryzen server boards. I do find couple on ASRock Rock Ryzen board, however, they are super expensive and very rare to find and buy.

The board I send you does use Giga PHY Intel® I211AT which is a good thing. In the future if I need more than 1GB speed that's provided by mobo, I will buy an extra intel 10GB network card. The only thing I need now is ECC support for data safety which is provided by this mobo too. And it is a micro-atx so it only have two PCIe. One will be occupied by the graphic card, and the other one will be either network card or a sas card if I really need more than 8 SATA drive. Should I just go with this motherboard? lol Really struggling here.

Also, would 550w power supply be enough to power this kind of setup? There is a deal going on right now hahah just would like to grab the deal and settle. Thanks

I don't have any positive comments on the Ryzen stuff. It'll be a tradeoff (or tradeoffs-plural) of some sort.

As for power supply sizing, I do have your comprehensive answer here:

 

NugentS

MVP
Joined
Apr 16, 2020
Messages
2,943
"I think RAIDz3 would be good choice? Lets say one drive failed and I put a new hdd in, then another two fails during the rebuild, I still won't lose any data. What's the chance of me losing more than two hdd during rebuild?"

RAIDZ3 is extremely safe. You can lose 3 drives and keep the data. The chance of loosing 3 drives is extremely low - BUT - it does exist.
What's your backup plan?
 

dak180

Patron
Joined
Nov 22, 2017
Messages
307
Yea, There are very little Ryzen server boards. I do find couple on ASRock Rock Ryzen board, however, they are super expensive and very rare to find and buy.
There is the X470D4U which should do what you need and does support Ryzen 5000 with bios 4.20 and seems to be reasonably priced.
 

adfafd

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 13, 2021
Messages
11
RAIDZ3 is extremely safe. You can lose 3 drives and keep the data. The chance of loosing 3 drives is extremely low - BUT - it does exist.
RAIDz3 it is then. So I will put all 6 drives in 1 Vdev of RAIDz3 and put this Vdev into 1 Zpool. Is this the correct way to do it? Then I can have 3 disk failure without losing data. I have heard that when 1 drive failed, and during the rebuild process, it is very common to lose another one or two hard drive... So I am kind of concerned about it.

And if I want to disk later on, I will have to create Vdev2 of same size and put it into the same Zpool?
 

adfafd

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 13, 2021
Messages
11
As for power supply sizing, I do have your comprehensive answer here:
Thanks for the link. After reading through, I find 550w might just be a tiny bit underpowered for it. Might go for 750w though
 

adfafd

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 13, 2021
Messages
11
There is the X470D4U which should do what you need and does support Ryzen 5000 with bios 4.20 and seems to be reasonably priced.
Thanks! $274 on Newegg are indeed a lot better priced.

I don't have any older AMD cpu, can this motherboard do a bios upgrade without a cpu?

Also from the link, it does say "On Linux system doesn't support Raid mode" in the Support OS section, is this something I need to be worried about? Will it affect how TrueNas work on it?
 

Arwen

MVP
Joined
May 17, 2014
Messages
3,599
@adfafd - No, you don't need to worry about the "On Linux system doesn't support Raid mode". This is a good thing, as ZFS handles the RAID functions. No, it will not affect TrueNAS. Just make sure the BIOS is in non-RAID mode for the SATA ports.
 

Arwen

MVP
Joined
May 17, 2014
Messages
3,599
I think what AMD needs is more modest server chip & socket. It can still use the chiplet on I/O chip design. So, same CPU chiplet. But, more PCIe lanes than the AM4 socket supports, and don't need the graphics. So the socket does not have to be much bigger than the AM4. Have built in ECC of course, (and perhaps now DDR5 option), as well as perhaps 3 or 4 memory channels. (The full blown Epyc has 8 channels, while the AM4 Ryzens are limited to 2 channels. Nothing in between unless a board does not expose some memory channels on Eypc.)

Using the SP3 Epyc is overkill for many small or light weight server uses. And the size of the chip and socket! Not to mention that the heat sink can make nuclear cooling towers look small. (Okay that last bit was a alot of hyperbole, but a chip that seems to weigh 1lbs? And heat sink larger than some power supplies?)
 

adfafd

Dabbler
Joined
Nov 13, 2021
Messages
11
I don't have any positive comments on the Ryzen stuff. It'll be a tradeoff (or tradeoffs-plural) of some sort.
I actually just found out that i3-9100 does support ecc. Is this cpu good enough to run TrueNas with some lightweight transcoding and a very lightweight vm running ubuntu?

Also do you have suggestion on the server grade motherboard for this cpu?
 
Top