Is this a good and working setup ?

[Cooledspirit]

Hello,

I'm wondering how well the setup below would run with 64 bit FreeNas ? Anybody got something similar ?

The AMD A85X chipset is relatively new and supports 8 sata-600 ports. Is that chipset and motherboard supported ?
Anybody knows if the GbE on that motherboard works well for FreeNas ?
Is the CPU powerful enough ? Even for some plugins? Or better leave it to NAS activities alone ?

I might underclock/undervolt some things to reduce power consumption (and disable some unnecessary hardware).

• Motherboard: MSI FM2-A85XA-G65
• CPU: AMD A serie A4-5300, (A series A4-5300 - 3.4 GHz)
• RAM: Corsair Value Select, (16 GB : 2 x 8 GB - DIMM 240-pins - DDR3 - 1333 MHz / PC3-10600 - CL9 - 1.5 V)
• HDD: 6x WD Red WD30EFRX (3 Tb, sata-600)
• Computer Case: Fractal Design Arc Midi Tower (hosts 8 3.5 inch drive bays)
• UPS: PowerWalker VI 1000 LCD - UPS (220-240 V AC V - 600 Watt - 1000 VA 7 ampère-hour - USB)
• PSU: recycled PSU (400 Watt, 80 Bronze)

Thanks in advance for your feedback !

Kind regards,



Cooled.

 

[paleoN]

The AMD A85X chipset is relatively new and supports 8 sata-600 ports. Is that chipset and motherboard supported ?

This is likely too new. Does FreeBSD even support this besides in HEAD?

 

[Cooledspirit]

This is likely too new. Does FreeBSD even support this besides in HEAD?

I have found nothing about this new chipset on FreeBSD, so I assume it's not supported (yet).

I don't mind switching to Intel or some other AMD chipset, but I'd like the alternative to have at least 6 sata-600 ports on board, preferably even more. Any suggestions?

 

[cyberjock]

Why SATA 600 ports? Standard hard drives usually can't even max out SATA 300, and typically are only slightly limited by SATA 150. For a FreeNAS situation, unless you plan to use 10Gb LAN, you probably won't see any benefit over SATA 150.

 

[Cooledspirit]

Why SATA 600 ports? You do realize that standard hard drives can't even max out SATA 300, and typically are only slightly limited by SATA 150. For a FreeNAS situation, unless you plan to use 10Gb LAN, you probably won't see any benefit over SATA 150...

It really sounds like you are wanting to spend lots of money on stuff that won't really help performance.

I read somewhere that the SATA-600 port makes a difference for the hard drives with 64 Mb cache. I don't know to what level this is true ? I just went for a modern motherboard hosting a lot of SATA ports. This motherboard costs 99 euro, it's not that expensive to me, considering it has 8 sata-600 ports directly on board, comparing with Intel motherboards that are usually far more expensive and support less SATA ports, introducing the need for additional sata controllers. Issue is of course the support of this new chipset/motherboard by FreeBSD.

Alternatives and suggestions are of course always welcome, even for SATA-300 proposals. I also believe, if there would be a difference between SATA-300 and SATA-600 for a hard drive, it would be very minimal and rely only on what is already in the cache of the hard drive, which would be fairly limited.

I'd like to keep cost and power consumption low, while performance optimal (don't we all), so any help is appreciated.

 

[cyberjock]

I've never heard of SATA 600 making a difference with hard drives, at all. Nor could I understand the reason why it would matter. If you can provide a link I'd be interesting in reading more. But to be honest, I've never heard of anyone ever saying that it matters. Especially considering that for a high performance FreeNAS setup the limitation for reads/writes will be your LAN speeds.

 

[paleoN]

Many lower cost AMD boards have six SATA 600 ports on them. No reason to get anything less. On the Intel side you usually have to pay a bit more to find the 6 SATA ports, but the more expensive Intel boards often have Intel NICs on them as well.

 

[centuriond]

I have a Biostar A85W holding an A4-5300 with 6x 3tb drives in Raid-Z2 (2x WD30EZRX with head parking set at 300s and 4x ST3000DM001 drives) and everything works really well. I've hit 110MB/s, but it wasn't an easy path. I've tried NAS4Free, OpenMediaVault, and FreeNas 8.3.0 which was the only distro to work with my setup (NAS4Free wouldn't see my drives and OMV was painfully slow if it ever booted which was rare).

Give it a try!