mainboard advice for my first FreeNAS setup

[daf]

Dear all, this is my first post but I spend several weeks reading through the excellent tutorials/presentations and user posts on this forum.
I'm gathering hardware to build a system that will be used as an iscsi host and cifs host mainly, but will also be my main upnp server (minimserver) and will consist of a lot of media files. I might use plex for media encoding but I might as well not.
I have recently bought an
SuperChassis 846BE16-R920B , which has a 24 disk SAS2 expansion port and some pretty nifty airflow design and an integrated power supply.
My plan gradually build a system with 4 zpools of 1 vdev each with 6 drives in a zraid1 configuration. Since I don't have the money to buy all the harddrives at once I will collect them all in time and once I have another 6 i will build the new zpool.
I will start with a zpool that consists of 3x3TB and 3x2TB discs to start and first experiment with the usage of FreeNAS and once I feel comfortable with is replace these 2TB and 3TB one by one with 8Tb drives.
A major concern is power usage.. I know with a 24 drive system will use a lot of wattage but I want to limit power usage as much as possible. Therefor I spent quite some to to find the best mainboard and I'm pretty much interested in a Intel Xeon D-1518 solution. The board seems to have both a SAS2 controller, 2x 10Gbps and 2x 1Gbps, and this SOC appears to be Supermicro X10SDV-4C-7TP4F.
I'll add 2x 16 Samsung M391A2K43BB1-CRC RAM to start with.
I will install FreeNAS on a small SSD I still have lying around, and might add L2ARC in the case performance of iSCSI is lacking..

I would like to ask you guys several questions about this setup:

* Can someone give me advice if there are any arguments to also look for a Non-SOC setup along with a E3 / E5 xeon CPU in terms of performance vs power usage? After looking at benchmarks and reading several reviews I'm sure a Intel Xeon D-1518 gives me all the power I need and power usage of either a E3/E5 xeon will be higher anyway. Of course the other argument would be to be able to upgrade the CPU in the future, but I guess I will use this system for several years and by the time I need a more powerful setup I will also need to upgrade more than just the CPU..

* Will a Xeon D family member with some extra cores / higher frequency have any benefit

* Will the superchassis have sufficient airflow to stay with the passive cooling on this mainboard? Or will I very likely run into problems?

* Is it still a bit problematic to connect the SAS2 expansion board to the SAS3 controller? Or is it highly recommended to use the LSI 2116 SW controller on the board I liked to? (and do I need to flash the firmware for it to work with FreeNAS 9.10 ?

* Would it be wise to use the beta build for FreeNAS 10 (as I assume the official release of FreeNAS 10 is not far away from this date and I guess it will be possible for beta users to upgrade to the official release?

* In order to save power I'm thinking about power cycling this system (it also has to do with my house and the fact that I'm using solar power to power my house) will use a cron job to switch the system off at night and use the IPMI interface to power the system on. I know that power cycling increases the risk of loss of data, but I've been power cycling my Synology NAS for 6 years now without any problem whatsoever.. So I'm willing to take that risk. Does someone know if I can program the IPMP interface to start the system up at a given time each day?

Any advice is highly appreciated!

Thanks in advance..

 

[SCS]

Dear all, this is my first post but I spend several weeks reading through the excellent tutorials/presentations and user posts on this forum.
I'm gathering hardware to build a system that will be used as an iscsi host and cifs host mainly, but will also be my main upnp server (minimserver) and will consist of a lot of media files. I might use plex for media encoding but I might as well not.
I have recently bought an
SuperChassis 846BE16-R920B , which has a 24 disk SAS2 expansion port and some pretty nifty airflow design and an integrated power supply.
My plan gradually build a system with 4 zpools of 1 vdev each with 6 drives in a zraid1 configuration. Since I don't have the money to buy all the harddrives at once I will collect them all in time and once I have another 6 i will build the new zpool.
I will start with a zpool that consists of 3x3TB and 3x2TB discs to start and first experiment with the usage of FreeNAS and once I feel comfortable with is replace these 2TB and 3TB one by one with 8Tb drives.
A major concern is power usage.. I know with a 24 drive system will use a lot of wattage but I want to limit power usage as much as possible. Therefor I spent quite some to to find the best mainboard and I'm pretty much interested in a Intel Xeon D-1518 solution. The board seems to have both a SAS2 controller, 2x 10Gbps and 2x 1Gbps, and this SOC appears to be Supermicro X10SDV-4C-7TP4F.
I'll add 2x 16 Samsung M391A2K43BB1-CRC RAM to start with.
I will install FreeNAS on a small SSD I still have lying around, and might add L2ARC in the case performance of iSCSI is lacking..

I would like to ask you guys several questions about this setup:

* Can someone give me advice if there are any arguments to also look for a Non-SOC setup along with a E3 / E5 xeon CPU in terms of performance vs power usage? After looking at benchmarks and reading several reviews I'm sure a Intel Xeon D-1518 gives me all the power I need and power usage of either a E3/E5 xeon will be higher anyway. Of course the other argument would be to be able to upgrade the CPU in the future, but I guess I will use this system for several years and by the time I need a more powerful setup I will also need to upgrade more than just the CPU..

* Will a Xeon D family member with some extra cores / higher frequency have any benefit

* Will the superchassis have sufficient airflow to stay with the passive cooling on this mainboard? Or will I very likely run into problems?

* Is it still a bit problematic to connect the SAS2 expansion board to the SAS3 controller? Or is it highly recommended to use the LSI 2116 SW controller on the board I liked to? (and do I need to flash the firmware for it to work with FreeNAS 9.10 ?

* Would it be wise to use the beta build for FreeNAS 10 (as I assume the official release of FreeNAS 10 is not far away from this date and I guess it will be possible for beta users to upgrade to the official release?

* In order to save power I'm thinking about power cycling this system (it also has to do with my house and the fact that I'm using solar power to power my house) will use a cron job to switch the system off at night and use the IPMI interface to power the system on. I know that power cycling increases the risk of loss of data, but I've been power cycling my Synology NAS for 6 years now without any problem whatsoever.. So I'm willing to take that risk. Does someone know if I can program the IPMP interface to start the system up at a given time each day?

Any advice is highly appreciated!

Thanks in advance..

Disk draw will be your largest consumer of power, and if you are looking to run plex or anything like that then going with a low power CPU isn't really going to save you anything. I've got a full blown 4 core 8 thread xeon 140w tdp and my system with 4 x 2 TB 5900 RPM drives (old drives from last NAS) only drew a bit over 40w idling. That was will a 7 PCIe slot (Full ATX motherboard), 64GB DDR4 ECC, and 6 case fans. Chasing a low power CPU isn't going to be all that advantageous as CPU's these days drop way down when not in use, furthermore it will be able to work through a scrub, or other strenuous task faster and get back to that low power state vs running a weaker cpu at a higher level longer.

I tossed about the idea of the really low power CPU's and they look good on paper, but when it comes to idle which my system does 99% of the time there was almost no value in the really low power devices in comparison. Mine I have little or no intention of upgrading, unless I can pick on up one super cheap maybe even used. My system with 10 x 4TB 7200RPM + 4 x 2TB 5900RPM and everything else was only 130w-138w. Through some tuning in the bios and such i've been able to get the system down to about 100w.

7200RPM drives are power hungry. Any of my future expansion beyond my 10 drives will be SSD due to the low operating/idle power consumption.

Also for iSCSI, you want at least 64GB of ram from my understanding. You also don't want to be adding any L2ARC until you max out your ram, as the L2ARC will eat up your system ram, and provide a slower experience. I have 64GB of ram and am not planning to add L2ARC until I get my next back of 64 GB of ram hitting 128GB. Adding an L2ARC will hurt performance with the amount of ram you currently have spec'ed.

If you're asking these question I wouldn't play with any of the beta's or nightly's as those are more for people that know what they are doing. I've run FreeNAS for over 4 years and I don't want to trust the integrity of my data to a beta or experimental build, I only run the stable, and even those I'm usually about a month behind in case something crops up after a new patch is released.