Hello from Texas

[AVTechMan]

Hi everyone,

Been a lurker for awhile but decided to register and to get a little insight. I live in Texas near the Houston area and have been building a home lab to not only learn on but to store all my media and other files as well.

Here is the quick questions I have....

I have two Supermicro 4U SC846 chassis that have been sitting idle for awhile. One of them used to be an unRAID server and the other was a Windows server, but haven't been used for some time and both have been decommissioned. I was considering turning one of them into a FreeNAS server to test out for pure data storage.

For the most part, I know its best to use server grade hardware. I have a couple Dell R710's that I am running as a two-node Hyper-V cluster with Starwind VSAN so all I will be using FreeNAS for is just purely a fileserver.

Here is some of the hardware that may make a contender for this Freenas build:

Supermicro Computer X8SIL-F LGA 1156 Socket motherboard
Intel Xeon X3440 Quad Core CPU
16GB of DDR3 RDIMM ECC RAM

The server chassis has the BPN-SAS-EL2 backplane which of course will only support up to 2TB drives. I also have an LSI-9211-8i HBA to use as well, since only one cable connection is needed to the backplane.

I know the above is older hardware, and I have no problem upping the RAM to 32GB for more ZFS efficiency. However, if newer hardware is suggested then I can look into that too, and re-purpose the above hardware for something else. Though I do have an idea on how the pools work I am going to read more info on it on how its set up. I know that adding drives is not as easy as it would be for unRAID, but this would be a system I plan to use for long term storage.

Look to be a part of the community!

 

[BigDave]

Welcome to the forums.
The SC846 chassis is fairly popular around here, I run a couple of the same type of chassis
but they are 836 & 826 configuration. Both if them had TQ backplanes which I removed and
replaced them with SAS2 models. I also upgraded the PSUs with Super Quiet models.
If you have no issues with paying for increased power used by the older hardware, then starting
out with what you have, gives you the advantage of a lower starting cost. The 2TB limitation
of the backplanes would be a deal breaker for a lot of users, but those 2TB NAS drives are cheap!
I personally don't care for the bigger capacity chassis for home use, wrestling with even the
836 is too much for this old fart. Any purchases I make in the future will be the 2U variety.
Give some thought to your long term goals and I'm sure you will find a pool configuration
that will work for you. Remember in FreeNAS, pools are made of Vdevs and with FreeNAS,
you can add Vdevs to an existing pool with out issue.

 

[AVTechMan]

Welcome to the forums.
The SC846 chassis is fairly popular around here, I run a couple of the same type of chassis
but they are 836 & 826 configuration. Both if them had TQ backplanes which I removed and
replaced them with SAS2 models. I also upgraded the PSUs with Super Quiet models.
If you have no issues with paying for increased power used by the older hardware, then starting
out with what you have, gives you the advantage of a lower starting cost. The 2TB limitation
of the backplanes would be a deal breaker for a lot of users, but those 2TB NAS drives are cheap!
I personally don't care for the bigger capacity chassis for home use, wrestling with even the
836 is too much for this old fart. Any purchases I make in the future will be the 2U variety.
Give some thought to your long term goals and I'm sure you will find a pool configuration
that will work for you. Remember in FreeNAS, pools are made of Vdevs and with FreeNAS,
you can add Vdevs to an existing pool with out issue.

Hi, thanks for your insight. I have been torn about what to do with the backplanes in the chassis but unfortunately the SAS2 backplanes have been really hard to find on ebay, and I didn't want to buy another chassis that had them. But even with all 24 bays populated with the 2TB drives, it will offer 48TB raw storage. Two of those would be 96. I was able to replace the original PSU's in them with more energy efficient ones. And I will be getting rid of the old AMD boards that used the ancient DDR2 FB-DIMMS...lol. While its true the 2TB limitation would be a deal breaker for many, it isn't for me since I can always build a brand new system with modern hardware. I try to find a use for everything I have, unless its too old then it gets recycled.

I also like the 2U servers also as they are easier to mount in the rack and somewhat easier finding rails for (which has been a nightmare for the SM chassis). Either way the 4U chassis will probably not be running 24/7 anyway, so they will be more like cold storage servers, and powering them on when needed. I'm still working on a pool configuration plan so there's time.