Hello, Pondering NAS for home network backup

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

Hello, Newbie here.

My experience with Linux goes back to MKLinux DR3 - a port of Red Hat 5.2 to the Mach Microkernel running on 32-bit PPC.

Other than a Windows laptop for Photoshop (DSLR) I'm currently running CentOS 7 for everything.

I will soon be building an NAS and I believe ZFS to be the best filesystem for that task. I believe the inclusion of RAID and Logical Volume Management into the filesystem itself has significant benefits over separate software components for the file system, RAID, and LVM.

ZFS can work in CentOS 7 but it looks like the best support is in FreeBSD which makes FreeNAS the logical choice for me. It appears that RHEL engineers don't consider ZFS support to be a goal of theirs, which means kernel updates could break the third party ZFS drivers available for CentOS, which is not acceptable for a backup device.

The primary purpose of the NAS will be for backing up various computers on my home network. There is no secondary purpose, at least not yet. I will not use it for things like multimedia server. I will not use it for files that are used in an application while the NAS is mounted on another computer. I will not use it for a database.

It will just sit there on the network, when a computer needs to do a backup (or restore from a backup), it is there for that purpose.

The board I plan to use :

SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCL-F-O LGA

It looks like a revision of the same board I see referenced in some of the FreeNAS documentation and forum posts as working well. For CPU - Xeon E3 (quad core). For the NAS - six 4TB Red NAS drives.

I plan on using RAIDZ2 which if I ubderstand correctly means I will have 12TB of storage, and two drives worth of redunancy, so it would take 3 drive failures to kill the pool.

The board has six SATA II headers which should be plenty to saturate a gigabit network, especially since my switches are cheap consumer switches so I doubt the gigabit NIC itself will ever actually flow at gigabit.

Is there any reason I shouldn't use the SATA II on the board?

As it will be serving as a backup server and not a source of data being used by live applications, I do not believe I will benefit from an L2ARC device.

I may benefit from a ZIL device, thoughts / experience ?

I plan to start with 16GB of ECC (board requires ECC) and if that proves to be not enough, max it out to 32GB which is the board limit.

For booting the NAS I am considering a Super Talent "Half Mini 2 PCIe SM1 16GB IDE SSD (MLC)"

Basically, I don't like flash drives hanging off a USB port. I just don't like them. I have never heard of Super Talent before and do not know if they are reliable, but at least the concept of what they make is what I want - the board has 3 PCI-E slots, I figure use one of them for the boot device. But I have no idea if FreeBSD supports that card. It's nice conceptually because it just slips in the PCI-E slot, no external component, no wires to drive, no power cable needed.

Sequential Read Rate: 98 MB/s (max)
Sequential Write Rate: 22 MB/s (max)
Interface: IDE / PATA

My assumption is generic IDE/PATA drivers will work with it.

Anyone have experience with that card or a similar concept in FreeBSD / FreeNAS ?

In the event I do need a ZIL device, I would probably purchase another PCI-E card with two or more SATA-III headers for two SSD devices.

Is there a particular card that people really like that works well with FreeBSD?

I only ask because if I see it on incredible sale I'll pick it up whether I need it or not in case I end up needing it.

-=-

It will be months before I build this, I still have to run cat6 to the room where it will live, I have backup now that works but just not ideal, and there's another box I will be building first.

Mostly I'll probably be fairly silent on the forum until then, can't really answer questions until I have experience with FreeNAS, but I thought I'd introduce myself and ask those questions I do have.

Thank you for your thoughts and your time,

Michael A. Peters

Alice Wonder Miscreations

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Is there any reason I shouldn't use the SATA II on the board?

Only if the controller is questionable. What's the chipset?

I may benefit from a ZIL device, thoughts / experience ?

Can't imagine why a backup-only FreeNAS would need a dediated SLOG device.

Anyone have experience with that card or a similar concept in FreeBSD / FreeNAS ?

I've seen questions raised recently in these forums about whether current generation FreeNAS will boot from an IDE device.

 

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

For the ZIL device, my understanding which is newbie understanding and therefore might be way off is that gave some performance advantages if multiple clients were doing backups at the same time, and that it gave some protection against power outage because the ZIL in memory would be mirrored to the SSD device which could have its own protection against power loss.

I use a UPS but I don't trust them, I had a UPS fail in a bad way, where it just suddenly stopped working cutting off power to my system when there wasn't a power problem. APC said it was a manufacturing problem and replaced the unit, but ever since then I have not been as confident in their ability to truly protect me from power issues because I have experienced where they cause a power problem. Bad power supplies I suppose can too.

But I think I will go probably initially try without a ZIL device and see if there are performance issues that could be solved if I had one, and not worry about that from the start.

Thank you.

-=-

For the boot device, I'm beginning to shy away from the Super Talent device. I just don't know anything about them. I may instead just get a PCI-E card with am M-SATA slot and a decent brand M-SATA SSD for the boot device.

Any recommondations on a PCI-E M-SATA adapter known to work with FreeNAS ?

I don't need enterprise quality, I assume if the boot device fails I can still boot off of a flash device until I replace it.

-=-

I will look up the chipset on the board. Looks like an older model board, as in not the most current generation of CPU, but that's okay - that saves me money ;)

 

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

Okay reading in the performance forum I think I have a better understanding of a ZIL device and no, it won't benefit me at all.

 

[danb35]

As to the rest of your proposed build: the MB is fine (it's what I'm using). A Xeon is overkill for your use case--an i3, or probably even a Pentium, would do the job.

As to the boot device, remember that your chosen motherboard has an internal USB port. Nothing needs to hang out the back.

 

[Jailer]

For the intended use you plan on a USB boot device is sufficient. You would have to get an adapter card of some sort anyway if you went with your proposed Supertalent drive since it's Mini PCIe drive and there are no Mini PCIe slots on that motherboard.

 

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

Gah there are so many different PCI-E that do fit in each other, thank you for noticing that. I read mini pci-e as if it was a 1x PCI-E low profile that was half-height. That's not what it says but that's how I read it.

I don't like leaving external USB flash drives inserted, it may not be rational but it just gnaws at me mentally so I want to avoid that.

I found a PCI-E adapter with both an m-sata adapter on it and a SATA-III adapter on it. I think I'll use that with the m-sata adapter.

 

[Jailer]

I don't like leaving external USB flash drives inserted

As to the boot device, remember that your chosen motherboard has an internal USB port. Nothing needs to hang out the back.

 

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

Wow, okay when I read "Internal USB port" I thought he was talking about the board headers.

Looking at image of the board I can see that port, interesting that it is not pointed out in the newegg page in the specifications.
Yes, that would work.

 

[danb35]

...and even if I were talking about the headers, you can buy a $3 adapter to plug into the header and give you a USB A port.

 

[AliceWonderMiscreations]

Um, okay.

 

[danb35]

Um, okay.

My point is simply this: If you're concerned about USB sticks hanging off the back (or front) of your machine, there are lots of ways to deal with that while still using a USB flash drive for the OS. One, available with some boards (including the SuperMicro board you're looking at), is an onboard, internal USB port. A second is an inexpensive adapter to plug in to the internal headers on the motherboard and give you a USB port--again, you can keep the drive inside the case this way. A third way is to use a drive like the Sandisk Cruzer Fit, which only extends about 1/4" from the port--so even if it's external, it doesn't protrude enough to be a problem.