Hello all, newbie here. Feedback on my "spare parts" build?

[HoneyBadger]

Long time lurker, first time poster. The goal was "slow, but stable" - this is for holding family photos and videos, and a much overdue upgrade to a Linux/Atom box.

Running FreeNAS-9.2.0-RELEASE-x64 on the following hardware:

System: HP ProLiant ML110 G5
CPU: Xeon 3075
RAM: 8GB (4x2GB) Axiom DDR2-800 ECC
NIC: PCI Intel Pro/1000GT (onboard NC105i unused)
HDD: 2x Hitachi 5K3000 2TB (mirrored)

So, how's my "spare parts" build? ;)

Personal notes: I'm aware the 8GB of RAM sucks, and the NIC is PCI. But for the price of $70 without drives (basic machine was $20, RAM was $10 a stick, NIC was $10), I'm quite happy with it, and it performs more than well enough to house the family photo collection.

 

[gpsguy]

Congratulations!

As a lurker you probably took your time and did things right. And probably read the manual too.

All too often we see new users show up and think 2Gb RAM is adequate for ZFS.

Don't go back to lurking.




Sent from my phone

 

[root]

Long time lurker, first time poster. The goal was "slow, but stable" - this is for holding family photos and videos, and a much overdue upgrade to a Linux/Atom box.

Running FreeNAS-9.2.0-RELEASE-x64 on the following hardware:

System: HP ProLiant ML110 G5
CPU: Xeon 3075
RAM: 8GB (4x2GB) Axiom DDR2-800 ECC
NIC: PCI Intel Pro/1000GT (onboard NC105i unused)
HDD: 2x Hitachi 5K3000 2TB (mirrored)

So, how's my "spare parts" build? ;)

Personal notes: I'm aware the 8GB of RAM sucks, and the NIC is PCI. But for the price of $70 without drives (basic machine was $20, RAM was $10 a stick, NIC was $10), I'm quite happy with it, and it performs more than well enough to house the family photo collection.

Hi, here an other lurker, jeje.

Casually Im looking a basic or "entry level" hardware for my first freenas machine. The prices of supermicro board are expensive for me now. So I was looking an used ml110 g5, like you

Thinking that you Are running you ml110 in "poducction". I have some questions that you may help me:
- Do you use transmission? If yes whats the performance?
- Do you use plex? If yes whats the performance?
- Why you dont use the integrated NIC? I think integrated nic is better than a PCI nic.
- Where did you bought more ram?

Thanks!

 

[HoneyBadger]

Hi, here an other lurker, jeje.

Casually Im looking a basic or "entry level" hardware for my first freenas machine. The prices of supermicro board are expensive for me now. So I was looking an used ml110 g5, like you

Thinking that you Are running you ml110 in "poducction". I have some questions that you may help me:
- Do you use transmission? If yes whats the performance?
- Do you use plex? If yes whats the performance?
- Why you dont use the integrated NIC? I think integrated nic is better than a PCI nic.
- Where did you bought more ram?

Thanks!

Hello and welcome!

I am not running Transmission or Plex on my FreeNAS machine - it is just storage and nothing more, so I cannot speak to performance. As I only have 8GB of RAM I would not want to risk running anything too intense as I am already right on the "minimum specs" for ZFS.

The integrated NC105i NIC is a Broadcom device, and FreeNAS prefers and performs better with Intel NICs.

Additional RAM I purchased used from a local computer store, along with the ML110 itself. I did do a long burn-in test for stability to ensure that I was not getting bad parts. To purchase DDR2 ECC RAM online I would have had to search eBay and pay roughly twice as much, so I was very lucky to find the deal that I did.

Hope this helps!

 

[root]

- So, you use smb/cifs protocol to connect from your home network?
- What is the throughput in transfers?

I agree that 8gb of ram is the minimun specs for ZFS, but unless you transfer files all the time from your home network, I think that we can use other services while the server is in idle. Dont you think?

 

[HoneyBadger]

- So, you use smb/cifs protocol to connect from your home network?
- What is the throughput in transfers?

Yes, this system is used almost exclusively via CIFS from Windows machines for photos and videos. Throughput depends on the file size, smaller reads (photos) are around 15-20MB/s, but larger sequential reads (videos) sit around 100MB/s. Write speeds are similar based on the size of the files. I didn't build this one for performance, only stability.

I agree that 8gb of ram is the minimun specs for ZFS, but unless you transfer files all the time from your home network, I think that we can use other services while the server is in idle. Dont you think?

Personally, I'm not willing to risk it. ZFS does not react well to being starved for memory and could kernel panic, resulting in potential pool loss. Given how important what I am storing is, I would rather use a separate machine for downloads/transcoding.

 

[jgreco]

ZFS's memory is kernel memory. Userland programs are likely to be swapped out if there is memory pressure, so I would rank the risk as relatively low. Obviously swapping will impact performance, but you can probably try and see how it goes.

 

[Andras]

I know this is an old post. I have a couple of ML110 G5 servers. I read on a couple of sites that even though HP state the max RAM is 4 x 2GB, it's still okay to install 4 x 4GB. I'm thinking of trying this although RAM is a bit pricey. I can get 16GB of 667 MHz for quite a lot cheaper than 16GB of 800MHz. Does anyone have any experience of this? Like the OP I'm backing up photos but was wondering of 16GB would give me more options. Also should I go with the onboard NIC of get a PCI one?

http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=c04286128 - HP specs

https://www.compuram.de/en/memory,hp+%28-compaq%29,server,proliant,ml110+g5.htm - 16GB advocated

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18372313 - 16GB

 

[HoneyBadger]

This is an old post, but thankfully the original poster is still here. ;)

The big question for me would be just how cheap you can get the 4GB sticks of RAM for. It's old technology and a little hard to justify the investment now when you can pick up 8GB RDIMMs for about $40-45.

I imagine it will work fine though - the 16GB in total, I mean.

But yes, ditch the onboard and use an Intel add-in card. Made the difference between ~60MB/s and pushing the edge of 100MB/s.

 

[Andras]

I can get 32GB worth of 4GB RDIMMs on ebay here in the UK for about £42 which (times approx 1.5) is about $63 USD. I think I'll give the 4GB modules a go and see if I can get the servers back into use. I know the technology is even older than the original post but it should meet my storage needs for a wee while. I guess that there a quite a few businesses upgrading their storage to 8GB RDIMMs so old 4GB modules are easy to get hold of for home use at the moment.

Any advice on good cheap Intel add in cards? I updated the bios and it sounded like a train until I did some of of the other updates. I did hear FreeBSD is best on Intel NICs so the onboard Broadcom NICs might still be a problem even with the lastest firmware and software. I thought of possibly adding a low profile graphics card and running FreeBSD or PC-BSD but I'm now thinking of just using the server without a monitor or keyboard.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Careful. The ML110 G5 can only take unbuffered ECC memory, it won't boot with registered DIMMs installed. FBDIMMs won't fit, and I'm not certain about "parity" (PC2-5300P).

As far as the add-in card, get the PRO/1000 CT PCIe card.

And yes, it sounds like a leaf blower on startup until it initializes everything and calms the fans down.

 

[Andras]

Thanks for the help HoneyBadger. I'd ordered some buffered RAM by mistake from ebay but managed to get it cancelled. It seems very difficult to get ECC unbuffered second hand rather than ECC buffered. Many ebay listings don't even tell you. The last post from the overclockers forum perhaps suggested to me that I didn't have to worry about whether it was registered RAM or not. There are quite a few pages mentioning people running non-ECC ram in these boxes but there are some complaints about stability so I thought I'd rather avoid that even with the extra checks ZFS files have.

I had a look through my spare parts and found an old 3COM 3c905B-TX which isn't Intel but is listed on the nas4free hardware pages. I'm not sure how to benchmark the bandwidth on the NIC. The cheapest Intel I could find was a Dell X0885. What's good about the PRO/1000 CT?

I have several different operating systems running at home so I think I'll do a lot more reading about routers and NICs since I've been having trouble with connections recently and am not sure if it's caused by my ISP or some problem with my local hardware. In the meantime I'll see if I can find some cheap unbuffered ECC RAM to get each box up to 16GB.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Search the keyword "PC2-5300E" or "PC2-6400E" - that should give you the unbuffered ECC listings; I didn't see any 4GB sticks at all though.

That old 3Com is something I used many, many years ago - it's 10/100 and you don't want that anywhere near your machine. The Dell X0885 is gigabit but it's PCI-X, it will work but won't give you as much performance as other options. The PRO/1000 CT is recommended because it's an Intel chipset (well supported, reliable) on the PCIe bus (so it doesn't have PCI bus sharing issues) and is low-power (as opposed to the PT model which can be spotted by its heatsink necessary to diffuse the extra heat)

Best of luck and don't get discouraged. :)

 

[gpsguy]

The 3c905B-TX is an ancient 10/100 PCI NIC. The Intel Pro/1000 CT is a gigabit PCI/e NIC. Worlds of difference.

Back in the day, I standardized on those 3Com NIC's.

 

[Andras]

I'm not discouraged but I'm aware I know next to nothing about networking.

I had a look for ddr2 800MHz ecc unbuffered/unregistered and found next to nothing with 4GB and few with 2GB.

If the 3Com NIC is so bad I probably should bin it tomorrow. I bid on and won another PCI-x NIC on ebay for £6 delivered. I know it's not PCIe but I'm probably just going to use the server for long term storage especially if I can't get more RAM. I'm not even sure which manufacturers make 4GB ECC unbuffered. I can see some Dataram unbuffered sticks in the States but nothing which I can buy without heavy import taxes. It would be good to hear if anyone knows of any servers which came with DDR2 6400 unregistered 4GB as standard so I might pick up something that was being scrapped. I will probably avoid the slower ram since I have 7 2GB sticks between the two servers and the 4GB are so hard to find that I'm likely to be mixing and matching and selling any extra 2GB ones which there's still a market for.

I'm getting the idea that selling these things off for parts is probably the way to go. Unless there's a cheap motherboard going second hand which would fit in the case but takes RAM of reasonable size and speed then I probably can't use them except to back stuff up and switch them off and let them gather dust. Another thought was to get another single server which has space for 8 modules so I can get 16GB in one box without using 4GB sticks.

 

[HoneyBadger]

ZFS cares way more about quantity of RAM than its speed, so don't sweat it if all you have is PC2-5300. If you can bump them up to 8GB fairly inexpensively they make for great little home machines for CIFS/NFS access.

As for a board swap, it's just a microATX case I believe, so any board in that form factor should fit fine.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, but there is also a point at which a crappy CPU begins to really drag the system down too. Memory is good at offsetting pool performance issues but doesn't help CPU issues as much.