Home use (media server + a little bit of misc) CPU choice

[jtonthebike]

Hi,

I'm currently getting to the build stage of my new Freenas box. I have some kit, namely a SuperMicro X9C-F-B board, 16Gb of ECC RAM (matched to board), 3x IBM 1015's, a supermicro 24 bay 846 chassis (currently being modified to accomodate ATX PSU, 3x 140mm and 2x 80mm fans) and there will be 12 3Tb disks going in it for now.

I have an E3-1230v2 CPU available to go in and also a Pentium G2030 spare from an old build. At the moment, I do not envisage a heavy demand on the server, however, that could change should I build an ESXi box and use iscsi or similar for some development work.

Within that lot of plans is to use RAIDZ2 as I am happy with 2x disks being used for parity

Anyway, with that preamble over and done.

I am unsure as to whether I should carry on with plans to use the E3 chip for the Freenas box, or, given my current media demands (two adults, one baby, both work full time + occasional evenings, a movie once a week and a MythTV server recording one or two shows a week) should I use the E3 in my intended ESXi box and take advantage of being able to run lots of VM's?

What sort of throughput in read speed would I see in using the G2030 compared to the E3-1230v2?

Will 16Gb of RAM be enough?

Kind regards
Jonathan

 

[marbus90]

you'll want 6 to 10 disks per raidz2 vdev, definitely not 12.

is that chassis an 846e16 perchance? if so, you'd only need 1 M1015. CPU doesn't really matter with your workload, as long as you don't use encryption. iSCSI does have some pitfalls - starts working well at 64GB RAM and you'll want to reserve 50 % of the pool size to avoid fragmentation issues. but well, ideally you'd want more vdevs for VMs rather than bigger ones... so that might not be an issue for you.

 

[jtonthebike]

thanks for your reply marbus90.

No, the chassis is a 24bay 846TQ-R900B I picked up for a good price. The mobo I have chosen to use (again, driven by price (I am a student)) only accepts 32Gb of ram. I am watching some things on eBay and may be able to pick 32Gb if things go to plan. I'd planned on not using internal sata as I felt they'd be better running from the m1015's - though there is no real reason to suggest this is true, and I got 3x cards including brackets coming to me for $70usd each + shipping (I'm in the UK BTW). I'd planned to use 2x vdev's with 6 drives, giving me 12 disks in total.

OK, i'll plan on using the E3 in another machine. I seem to have acquired several of these x9 motherboards for 50GBP each, which I thought was a good deal too.

I hadn't planned on using any form of encryption. I understand I can use NFS for esxi, so that may be better than iscsi.

I have no idea what sort of throughput I should expect. Do you/anyone else have any suggestions?

Regards
Jonathan

 

[marbus90]

Troughput highly varies with workload. That can range from 5MB/s to >100MB/s, depending on sync writes for VMs or sequential writes for big files over CIFS.

 

[jtonthebike]

Hi, thanks again ... perhaps I phrased it incorrectly, by throughput I meant typical read speed. I currently use an older Synology box and regularly see IRO30Mb's. I'd like to see >60-100 but with 12 disks and LAG x2 1GbE, I'm not sure if this is possible in the 'real world'.

 

[marbus90]

Gbe speeds is boring stuff. Sequential transfers from/to the array are probably in the 500+MB/s range. LAGG altough only works with multiple clients hammering the array at the same time, that's when IOPS count and of those you don't get much out of raidz levels compared to striped mirrors.

 

[jtonthebike]

Thank you marbus90, it's very much appreciate.