BUILD I think I've got my build together on paper, but I desperately need an idiot check

[Chazboski]

Hey guys, I’ve been creeping around for a bit and I’m getting close to being ready to pull the trigger on everything. However, I’m not convinced I’m making the best decisions with everything, so I wanted to get some opinions here.

The main goal of this build is to offset usage from the main gaming PC. The main rig runs a 295x2 GPU, so even when not under load it’s pulling decent amount of power from the wall. I’d like to save my sanity and wallet the pain of another Texas summer running the AC and that beast 24/7.

The second goal is to take all of my media and make it available in one area. Music may be a bit tricky since I still use iTunes to manage my larger iPod, and a quick google search tells me that may be a bit problematic, but being able to take all of my movies onto a plex server would be amazing. It would be for a lot of in home streaming with a bit of remote, and I can’t really imagine more than 5 users pulling from it quite honestly.

I’d also like to use crashplan to back up everything and keep me protected. There’s no real need for this, but it never hurts to be careful. This would ideally back up the main pc, one (possibly several) laptops, a phone and an iPad (this one being the lowest priority)

Like I said earlier, power consumption is one of my main concerns, but I’d also like to keep the noise to a minimum. The mini ITX build I’m considering would probably go in a shelf underneath my TV to make cable management easier, but I could always find a way to run a cable around my apartment if I need to hide it in the closet if you guys think I’d be better served with an rackmount server or something of that nature.

I may also try to run small servers for gaming with my friends, but not sure what the best way to do that would be. One thing we’ve talked about is setting up a pit boss machine for Civilization 5, but not sure that could be done this way.

I’m not 100% sure what type of RAID I should be looking at honestly, but I’m leaning RAIDZ1, but I've had people try to talk to me about RaidZ2. I'm aware that gives better security, but since a lot of this is media I'm not 100% convinced I need to give up the extra space. I'd love to hear some expert opinions.

I’ll be running FreeNAS with a slickbeard and Plex, again unless anyone has better suggestions.

This part list represents the final build, but originally I’ll be doing just 16 gb of memory and 4 total WD Reds. I have no idea what to do for a PSU since I’m not really sure what kind of draw I should be expecting here. I’m also considering an external blu ray drive to rip blu rays with handbrake, but again no idea what I’m doing.

The SSD is there to act as a cache, since I’m convinced I read somewhere that it can be a decent boost.

Please feel free to be brutally honest with this critique, I’m way out of my element and could really use some honest help from the experts. This is going to be my first server/NAS and while I’ve done a ton of gaming/casual builds, this is unexplored territory.

Here's the PCPartPicker list if that's easier, but I'll link the parts as well.

Motherboard/CPU

C2750D41

Case

Silverstone DS380B

Memory

Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ECC (Just one kit since I'll be starting with 4X4 TB

Storage

4 TB WD Red 4 TB seems to be the sweet spot right now. I'll be starting with 4 drives and later throwing in an additional 4 to save on costs.

SSD Cache
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IAELTAI/?tag=pcpapi-20
Kingston 120GB

Power Supply

Silverstone 450W Gold (Is this too much? Not enough? I only have a vague idea of how much power I'll be pulling).


Other things I've been considering are the actual networking. I didn't know if it would be worth it to throw a better NIC in there or to throw a switch with my main PC and the NAS on it before it hits the router.

Thanks in advance for any insight. I've been browsing Reddit and here for a bit, but I've reached information overload and am starting to really overthink things.

 

[marbus90]

The ASRock C2750D4I and C2550D4I have 6x Intel SATA ports and 6x Marvell. The Marvell ports are currently slow to unstable to the point of pool unavailability. Our recommendations for >6 SATA Ports are the Supermicro X10SL7-F and the ASRock E3C224D4I-14S.

Here's my receipt for 10 HDDs in a somewhat stylish case: LianLi PC-Q26, Seasonic G-450, ASrock E3C224D4I-14S, Xeon E3-1241 v3, 1-2 Crucial CT2KIT102472BD160B kits, 4x LianLi BP2SATA (1 included) for enabling hotswap on 2 bays each

The 450W PSU is enough. @jgreco: tried to disprove my point and fails. In the end it's all about begging for reserves, but if your PSU runs at 20% utilisation for 95% of the time and at a theoretical peak load of 80%, that's good enough in my book. Before I think about oversizing PSUs to insane amounts, think about a high-end online double-conversion UPS because americans do not know how to do a power grid.

I'd rather go for a Xeon than an Avoton if you want to host gameservers and a ton of plex transcodes. The Avoton is in theory good enough for 2 simultaneous transcodes - this is whitout any gameservers using up CPU cycles. The Xeon does 4-5 Transcodes simultaneously and for Gameservers the Xeon offers enough single-threaded performance. SRCDS, I'm looking at ya...

As for energy usage, the biggest factor are HDDs with ~6W each. I've got a few Xeon E3 v3 systems around, my workstation with 1225 v3, 32GB RAM and 1 SSD idles at <30W. Same would go for a FreeNAS, plus 6W per HDD and ~10W for the LSI SAS chipset onboard. Oh, and maybe 4W for the IPMI. In the end you probably won't see the 100W mark with all bays filled.
You're unlikely to utilize the SSD cache, better leave it out. Especially if you're going to get Kingston.

 

[jgreco]

The 450W PSU is enough. @jgreco: tried to disprove my point and fails.

Actually, I showed my work and did the research. You're still just waving your hands. Flailing, even.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/i-need-some-data-points.32829/#post-204099

You can feel free to save a watt or two by using a smaller power supply, but I prefer to use a slightly larger supply than marbus90 because I believe in derating and leaving a better safety margin. If I'm making a $1000++ storage server, the slight additional cost for the better power supply seems like a better idea. I expect equipment to last many years, and as it ages, that safety margin erodes. If there's a larger margin, then this is less of a problem. If something bad happens, like a stalled fan or a bad USB device, this is less of a problem.

 

[marbus90]

You haven't disproven my point yet. You're still just waving your hands, pointing at overprovisioning. You want derating to 80%. I even hold to this, yet you're still complaining that derating to 80% isn't enough. Even with less than 80% peak load and maybe 20% load during 95% of the time you're still complaining. If you derate to 50 or 60%, don't bother with brand PSUs but just buy that $20 china cracker.

 

[jgreco]

You haven't disproven my point yet. You're still just waving your hands, pointing at overprovisioning. You want derating to 80%. I even hold to this, yet you're still complaining that derating to 80% isn't enough.

No, I'm fine with 80%, but you've not been rigorous in your methodology.

Even with less than 80% peak load and maybe 20% load during 95% of the time you're still complaining. If you derate to 50 or 60%, don't bother with brand PSUs but just buy that $20 china cracker.

Where am I saying 50 or 60%, or even anything less than 80%? Now you're putting words in my mouth, and I'm going to say that's crossed the line. Cease and desist this line of discussion. I tried to be very fair and give it an equitable ending back in this post. I explained my reasoning and gave your reasoning credit to a fair extent, and told people to draw their own conclusions. I have more recently done a more thorough and accurate analysis based on available numbers and that analysis weakened your argument substantially by reducing the number of watts saved. Again, I think I tried to be very fair in showing the actual end results. Two watts saved your way (which was for a G-550, probably only one watt saved over a G-450!) My way leaves a larger safety margin at very minimal cost.

But now you're wandering around in other random threads, saying I've failed to prove my case. That appears to be taunting: this behaviour is unacceptable. Cease and desist. It is offtracking the threads of random bystanders and causing needless distraction. Thanks.

As to the OP, marbus90 has already made the point about the Marvells on the C2750. Possible issues of power supply sizing aside (grin), he's already posted great advice on that front. Alternatively, you could stick to six drives and the C2750, which is a great low-watt board if you stick to the six Intel. Or possibly figure out a way to utilize a HBA like the M1015, at some additional cost in watts.

 

[Ericloewe]

Regarding SSDs: The use case suggests that SLOG will be useless and L2ARC on a system of this size would be a fool's errand. So just drop the SSD. Invest in mirrored boot devices (and/or an SSD for boot, but not a V300, those things are nasty.) instead.

 

[cyberjock]

I'll avoid the PSU argument.. but I wouldn't go with the AsRock board. The Supermicro equivalent uses a couple of watts less power and doesn't have Marvell problems. So I'd go with that. Yes, it uses SO-DIMMs, but I consider that a small inconvenience over the Marvell problems. ;)

 

[Ericloewe]

I'll avoid the PSU argument.. but I wouldn't go with the AsRock board. The Supermicro equivalent uses a couple of watts less power and doesn't have Marvell problems. So I'd go with that. Yes, it uses SO-DIMMs, but I consider that a small inconvenience over the Marvell problems. ;)

Also a good point, since the Marvells add dubious value.

 

[marbus90]

There's an easy solution to the Marvell problem.

Don't use them. Problem vanishes.

Also I have reports from Rifken and cbreak of two of the Supermicro ITX Avoton boards releasing magic smoke from power relevant parts. The ASRock C2750D4I just dies without smoking up your PSU and chassis (and maybe house).

 

[jgreco]

There's an easy solution to the Marvell problem.

Don't use them. Problem vanishes.

Also I have reports from Rifken and cbreak of two of the Supermicro ITX Avoton boards releasing magic smoke from power relevant parts. The ASRock C2750D4I just dies without smoking up your PSU and chassis (and maybe house).

We've had reports of C2750D4I's dying? Either I'm still half asleep or I missed that.

But yes with the C2750 it's fine to treat it as a 6 port board and if you need more then add a M1015.

Ironically, ASRock sells the C2750 as part of a chassis (the 1U12LW-C2750) which is likely to emit the magic smoke since it supports 12 drives on a 250W PSU. It's a nice unit, but to use all 12 bays you need to use a M1015, and replace the power supply with something bigger (it's a flex-ATX PSU).

 

[marbus90]

On that point I agree, even I wouldn't be that mad. Supermicros 12-in1U system seems better with redundant 400W PSUs and LSI2116 controller with 4 free ports. Last I checked it was even at the same price point that the ASRock system - and comes with rails...

I can't pinpoint C2750D4I deaths that well, a few happened for irregular guests, even some in FreeNAS Minis. Nothing dramatic, but they've just stopped working. The Supermicro deaths altough were from regulars described as china cracker effects.

 

[jgreco]

Yeah, but ASRock had theirs out in the market months before Supermicro. That was the thing, for at least a little while, ASRock was putting out some interesting stuff. The rail thing, yeah, seemed a bit chintzy.

even I wouldn't be that mad

And really, I hope you didn't take that as a jab at you. I did not mean it that way.

 

[Chazboski]

I thought I responded to this already, must have forgotten to hit post.

Thanks for all the input guys! I'll definitely look into that Supermicro board now.

Is there a ELI5 about the issues with Marvell? Or is this something I need to do some homework to really understand what I'd be missing?

 

[marbus90]

They're not stable. Not even for Bootmedia. If you want to live in constant fear of pool loss due to controller inconsistencies, those are the ports to use. If not, ignore them and use Intel only.

 

[Chazboski]

Awesome, thanks for the information man!