BUILD Haswell C226 ITX build

[SweetAndLow]

I have out grown my little storage needs lately and thought it would be fun to build a full blow nas. Here are my current parts list and total cost. I haven't seen that many Haswell builds recently and the C226 chipset is fairly new. I have seen a couple builds using the ASRock motherboard that I'm using so I know it should work. I plan on using raidz2 which should get me around 10TB of usable storage.

Motherboard: ASRock E3C226D2I
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 V3 3.3GHz Quad-Core Processor
Memory: Crucial 16GB Kit CT2KIT102472BD160B Unbuffered ECC
Power Supply: SeaSonic 450W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply
Case: Fractal Design Node 304 Mini ITX Tower Case
Drives: 6x3tb WD reds

Cost wo/drives: $736 shipped to my door
Cost w/drives: $1,416 shipped to my door

 

[enemy85]

and the question is?

refer to http://forums.freenas.org/threads/mini-itx-c226-haswell-build.15371/ if u want information about that board...

 

[JohnK]

I personally would get the Seasonic G-360W. It is more than enough.
Also note that an i3 or Pentium might be more than enough. Though Xeon does sound nice.

Lastly you will note that most people settle for micro ATX. You can get a nice Supermicro for $160. Read their posts and you will see why, specially when things starts heating up in a small box.

 

[SweetAndLow]

I personally would get the Seasonic G-360W. It is more than enough.
Also note that an i3 or Pentium might be more than enough. Though Xeon does sound nice.

Lastly you will note that most people settle for micro ATX. You can get a nice Supermicro for $160. Read their posts and you will see why, specially when things starts heating up in a small box.

Good feedback! I choose that power supply because it was semi modular. I did notice that most people go with the 360. I think the xeon is the correct way to go. Most people cut corners on the CPU and end up having it pegged during heavy usage. I plan on having 4-5 users at a time. This nas will be mounted over NFS to my media PC which runs mythtv and a PVR. And 2 cifs mounts + dlna.

 

[JohnK]

I choose that power supply because it was semi modular. I did notice that most people go with the 360.

You will find that you only don't use the 6pin video card connector and that is easy enough to hide. For 6 drives you do need a SATA power splitter as the G360 only has 4 SATA connectors. I use this splitter.

Most people cut corners on the CPU and end up having it pegged during heavy usage.

I think most people overkill their CPU's. (My wife is sitting behind me surfing the web on my i7) I do most of my computing on my MythTV backend running a Celeron G530 2.4ghz.

Anyway what I can say about FreeNas is that is use Ram. I tested my set up for my purpose, pushing a few hundred gig to it, while watching my biggest blue-rays on 4 OpenElec devices and on my Nexus 7.
My CPU never ran over 50% capacity while I was using 19gig of RAM. I do read that people use Xeon's for Plex transcoding, but I don't see myself ever doing that.

 

[SweetAndLow]

I'm also a little unsure about the itx limit of 16G of ram. I think I'm going to give it a try because I like the small foot print. But if i do end up needing to upgrade it will require a new MB,16G more ram and a new case. I think if i get to that point I'll end up going with a full rack(managed switch, patch panel and nas)

 

[jonnn]

I am using this board in a PC-Q25 with power hungry Toshiba 7200RPM drives and have no issues with heat at all. As a matter of fact, I was able to completely unplug the top fan (because it was too loud and drawing like 3.5W) and only run the single 140mm fan at slow speed and nothing gets even close to overheating.

as far as PSU, I am running a 235W and it's been plenty. If I had WD greens I could run 12 or more drives off it, hell 20 drives with staggered spin up. As of now I see 170W from the wall on peak startup load. Once in freenas, it's 45W - 50W idle, 25.5W idle with drives asleep.. 60-70W on a CIFS transfer. I am running the cheap Pentium chip and 8GB ECC.

The board doesn't support speed control of non native PWM fans unfortunately.

One more thing, the ASRock C2750 Mini ITX board is now available at Newegg. 12 SATA and 4 DIMM's........

 

[SweetAndLow]

So I'm slowly getting things configured but so far I ran a couple local write test and averaged around 425MB/s on a 25G file. Does this seem decent for raidZ2?

Local Read straight off disk(using dd, iostat and python):
ada0: 125 MB/s
ada1: 133 MB/s
ada2: 132 MB/s
ada3: 131 MB/s
ada4: 131 MB/s
ada5: 134 MB/s
Total: 788 MB/s
avg. over all drives: 131 MB/s

Local Write through ZFS:
[root@FreeNAS /mnt/tubby]# dd if=/dev/zero of=25G bs=1024k count=25k 25600+0 records in 25600+0 records out 26843545600 bytes transferred in 60.800831 secs (441499649 bytes/sec)

CIFS Write(SSD->NAS):
Picture Attached but ~85MB/s