Mini-ITX Build Feedback: U-NAS + ASRock Rack E3C236D2I

[mattheja]

Hi. Looking to move to FreeNAS from my QNAP ts-251. Currently, I host about 3TB (and out of space) on the QNAP along with Plex (1, maybe 2 streams max), my ubiquiti controller, and datastore target for my ESXi homelab. I don't work with storage, so any feedback is welcome.

I'm mostly looking for any feedback or community experience with the U-NAS chassis. I move between posts overseas, and I would like to continue bringing my NAS with me in carry-on like I have with the QNAP. I'm also open to suggestions (fyi, a case like fractal node 304 is too large). If I did not have this requirement, I'd probably go with a more standard 2U or 3U case and simpler ATX board...m-ITX complicates everything so much.

Case: U-NAS NSC-401 - has 250W PSU and SAS backplane included
Motherboard: ASRock Rack E3C236D2I
CPU: Intel i3-7100
RAM: Crucial 16GB DDR4-2133 ECC UDIMM | CT16G4WFD8213
HDD: raidz1 - 3x HGST Ultrastar 7K6000 SAS 6TB *or* Seagate Ironwolf Pro 6TB *or* WD Red Pro 6TB -- I can't really decide between them, although I'm leaving towards the HGST's due to their better reliability numbers, but 5 year warranty is the primary goal.
Boot drive: one of my spare thumb drives

Questions:

• Any major considerations for full disk encryption? (I read docs.freenas.org on this, didn't seem like anything notable.)
  
• Is a SSD for SLOG worthwhile? Will any vendor's SSD work (aside from reliability or read/writes per minute), or are there potential driver issues with Samsung versus Intel?
• Any known problems with U-NAS chassis and the SAS/SATA backplane that they come with?
• Worthwhile to replace the PSU on the U-NAS with one of these 1-U flex Seasonic PSU's?

TIA

 

[KrisBee]

Don't have any experience of that U-NAS case, but have you considered the supermicro mini-tower SC721TQ-250B as an alternative ( It's used in the FreeNAS mini)? I have a Ablecom CS50-m which is essentially the same case. It has a removable m/board tray, v.good ventilation, SAS/SATA backplane, two internal 2.5 mounts and a similar 250w psu. The whole thing is pretty quiet. After taking a closer look at that U-NAS case, I'd say the SC721TQ is a superior design and much easier to work with.

AFAIK, connecting SAS drives to the SATA controllers on the Asrock m/board will not work. If you added a typical SAS/SATA RAID controller (which needs to operate in IT mode for zfs), you could make use of SAS drives.

Not sure why you'd want to swap out the psu. Noise? Reliability? Haswell Compatibilty?

 

[mattheja]

For the PSU, it would be for reliability, since my experience with U-NAS isn't too high, and I don't see a lot of them posted here. If I went with the Supermicro SC721TQ-250B, I'd feel more comfortable with that one given Supermicro's brand.

I looked at SC721TQ-250B before, but let me re-review the dimensions to see if it will work along with a quick look at the m-ITX supermicro boards again. The ASRock IPMI is java based, so I'm not super keen on that tbh.

 

[KrisBee]

Not used ASRock java based IPMI, seemed to remember there was a problem with it not being signed(?) for more recent java version, and linux users had some problems. But that could all be fixed now. Also I think Asrock was slow to bring out a kaby lake compatible BIOS for that m/board. Do the very latest Supermicro mini-itx boards may have html5 based ipmi now?

I was looking again at the SC721TQ-250B manual to see what it says about its backplane. Pretty sure its as I previously said. A big plus for the supermicro case is spares. HDD caddies, PSU and even the backplane are all replaceable.

 

[Chris Moore]

I am guessing that this is your first experience with ZFS, so I would suggest that you go to the resources section of the Forum and read the primer.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/zfs-primer.38927/#post-238057

HDD: raidz1 - 3x HGST Ultrastar 7K6000 SAS 6TB *or* Seagate Ironwolf Pro 6TB *or* WD Red Pro 6TB -- I can't really decide between them, although I'm leaving towards the HGST's due to their better reliability numbers, but 5 year warranty is the primary goal.

I am going to point out that the use of RAID-z1 (single parity) is not considered to be a good idea with drives larger than 1TB.
Drives fail, I have a server at work with 60 of the 6TB WD Red Pro drives and it has had 3 of those fail in the past 12 months.
The thing about those 6TB drives is they take days to resilver and during that time, you could have another drive fail which would kill your pool with the configuration you are considering. I would suggest that you consider a chassis like this, where you can use more drives:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1294418-REG/silverstone_cs280b_cs280_case_storage_series.html
Also, in the configuration you suggested and due to the overhead involved with ZFS, you would only have about 8 TB of usable capacity.

 

[Chris Moore]

Any major considerations for full disk encryption? (I read docs.freenas.org on this, didn't seem like anything notable.)

I forgot to comment on this earlier, but yes, there are huge considerations with it. If you encrypt your pool, you are risking the loss of all the data in the pool. There have been several instances of people not being able to access the pool again after any hardware change or even a reboot of the system. Just do a search on this Forum. There is actually a documented fault that should be fixed soon where under certain circumstances the pool is erased by the middleware when the key is entered to access the pool.

 

[mattheja]

I am guessing that this is your first experience with ZFS, so I would suggest that you go to the resources section of the Forum and read the primer.
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/zfs-primer.38927/#post-238057

I am going to point out that the use of RAID-z1 (single parity) is not considered to be a good idea with drives larger than 1TB.
Drives fail, I have a server at work with 60 of the 6TB WD Red Pro drives and it has had 3 of those fail in the past 12 months.
The thing about those 6TB drives is they take days to resilver and during that time, you could have another drive fail which would kill your pool with the configuration you are considering. I would suggest that you consider a chassis like this, where you can use more drives:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1294418-REG/silverstone_cs280b_cs280_case_storage_series.html
Also, in the configuration you suggested and due to the overhead involved with ZFS, you would only have about 8 TB of usable capacity.

I'd like to get a chassis with more drive space, but that is not going to work for my use case unfortunately. In my use case, I need portability, but I also need some form of parity to protect data integrity if I shut down the NAS, move, and then upon boot up I find a failed disk due to damages sustained during the movement. After extensive reading (and re-reading), I'm tracking the URE and rebuild strain with RAID5 or z1. Thanks for calling this out to me.

I have backups for my critical data, but losing the non-critical stuff would still be a huge pain.

If I were to get 4 drives, what is the general opinion for RAID-z2 versus 2 mirrored vdevs in 1 pool?

 

[Chris Moore]

I'd like to get a chassis with more drive space, but that is not going to work for my use case unfortunately. In my use case, I need portability, but I also need some form of parity to protect data integrity if I shut down the NAS, move, and then upon boot up I find a failed disk due to damages sustained during the movement. After extensive reading (and re-reading), I'm tracking the URE and rebuild strain with RAID5 or z1. Thanks for calling this out to me.

I have backups for my critical data, but losing the non-critical stuff would still be a huge pain.

If I were to get 4 drives, what is the general opinion for RAID-z2 versus 2 mirrored vdevs in 1 pool?

The case I linked to uses 2.5 inch drives, so it isn't huge even though it has 8 hot swap drive bays. Note, it also has an internal bay that I would suggest using for a SSD as the boot drive. A single SSD is much more reliable than even mirrored USB thumb drives. You can get a very good retired 32GB SSD for around $20 on eBay that will last for years. I didn't check the measurements, but you might want to take a closer look. I build shipboard systems for one of the groups where I work and we find that the laptop drives actually handle movement better than the 3.5 inch drives.

The big advantage of RAID-z2 is that any two drives can fail and the storage is still viable where with mirrors you loose the pool if the wrong two drives fail.

 

[mattheja]

The case I linked to uses 2.5 inch drives, so it isn't huge even though it has 8 hot swap drive bays. Note, it also has an internal bay that I would suggest using for a SSD as the boot drive. A single SSD is much more reliable than even mirrored USB thumb drives. You can get a very good retired 32GB SSD for around $20 on eBay that will last for years. I didn't check the measurements, but you might want to take a closer look. I build shipboard systems for one of the groups where I work and we find that the laptop drives actually handle movement better than the 3.5 inch drives.

The big advantage of RAID-z2 is that any two drives can fail and the storage is still viable where with mirrors you loose the pool if the wrong two drives fail.

I'd hate to ask such a simple question, but my initial googling/checking the normal brands isn't turning up much.

Are there any good 2.5 inch drives with more than 2TB and greater than just 2 year warranties?

 

[Chris Moore]

Are there any good 2.5 inch drives with more than 2TB

This is the model that we use in our deployable servers that ride the ships six months at a time.
https://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/product.aspx?item=9b-22-179-105
They are pretty reliable even if they only have a 2 year warranty. We deploy them in 8 drive sets and during a 6 month deployment we might loose one. Due to the classification of the data, we are required to crush the drives anyhow, so we don't attempt to access the warranty. If they can handle 6 months on, six months off going to sea, I would expect them to last much longer in shore based operation. I don't know if you have ever been on a small ship, but it is a much harsher environment than a regular office or home.

 

[mattheja]

This is the model that we use in our deployable servers that ride the ships six months at a time.
https://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/product.aspx?item=9b-22-179-105
They are pretty reliable even if they only have a 2 year warranty. We deploy them in 8 drive sets and during a 6 month deployment we might loose one. Due to the classification of the data, we are required to crush the drives anyhow, so we don't attempt to access the warranty. If they can handle 6 months on, six months off going to sea, I would expect them to last much longer in shore based operation. I don't know if you have ever been on a small ship, but it is a much harsher environment than a regular office or home.

The drives look to be cheaper on Amazon. Looking at their data sheet, they're limited to 140MB/s transfer speed. I guess that's part of the tradeoff for the form factor. Power usage is far lower, so I guess that's something.

I'll have to check the costs again. My motherboard choice decided to jump $40 since 2 days ago. :(

I'm partial to 4 (maybe 5) drives now at RAID-z2, which would be more than double my current capacity. Then in a couple years when it doesn't seem excessive, re-eval ZFS/FreeNAS (maybe ZoL, I dunno), and expand my storage pool with new/more drives then.

 

[Chris Moore]

Then in a couple years when it doesn't seem excessive, re-eval ZFS/FreeNAS (maybe ZoL, I dunno), and expand my storage pool with new/more drives then.

In a couple years they may have completed work on the proposed functionality to grow an existing RAID-z2 pool by simply adding more disks.
It is something they are working on. Right now, you would need to move all your data elsewhere, reconfigure the array, then move the data back.

 

[Chris Moore]

I have some of the servers at work running ZFS on Linux. It is really not that bad but all command line. Do you have a backgroundin Linux?
Personally, I prefer FreeNAS because it's relatively easy. For home, I am all about easy. I have to do too many things the hard way at work.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[kaih1984]

I'd like to get a chassis with more drive space, but that is not going to work for my use case unfortunately. In my use case, I need portability, but I also need some form of parity to protect data integrity if I shut down the NAS, move, and then upon boot up I find a failed disk due to damages sustained during the movement. After extensive reading (and re-reading), I'm tracking the URE and rebuild strain with RAID5 or z1. Thanks for calling this out to me.

I have backups for my critical data, but losing the non-critical stuff would still be a huge pain.

If I were to get 4 drives, what is the general opinion for RAID-z2 versus 2 mirrored vdevs in 1 pool?

U-NAS also has 8-bay version. With 8-bay you are able to configure 6-bay into RAID-z2 and another 2 bays for backup.

 

[Nomad]

If price is a thing, I'd look into the G46XX Processors. I picked one up a week ago for $76, they support ECC and bench around the same as the I3-7100.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2924&cmp[]=2948
Also i3 or G46XX the difference between 2133 and 2400 ram is about 7-15% under load. It's not noticeable on higher end CPU's but on these it is.

6TB Space is interesting right now. I was looking at the same drive selection when @Chris Moore turned me on to the Idea of these.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01K4241D0/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Some more work in involved getting the drive out but in a 4 disk setup saving $240 is a major cost reduction. Time vs Money vs Risk.

4 - WD Red 3 year warranty. $760
4 - WD Red Pro 5 Year warranty. $915
4- Seagate Backup Drives $476

Further Research has show me these are SMR drives which works fine for me because I'm write once, but know you data. If you are backing up photo's, videos, and 'unchanging' content and just writing new content these are amazing, but not recommended for OS, Database, micro writes like office files etc.

 

[Chris Moore]

Further Research has show me these are SMR drives

Where did you get that information? The ones I have pulled out are regular Seagate Desktop drives.
Just like this:

 

[Nomad]

Where did you get that information? The ones I have pulled out are regular Seagate Desktop drives.
Just like this: View attachment 21673

https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/a...UEYWGGHFUNIAUF3DQ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_pdp?ie=UTF8

Look under the review. He's was an Archive Drive. How long ago did you purchase yours? I had already pulled the trigger on the hubs, until I found this out. I don't think it will be an issue but I'm guessing these are just like the AE drives I was going to purchase right?

 

[Chris Moore]

https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/a...UEYWGGHFUNIAUF3DQ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_pdp?ie=UTF8

Look under the review. He's was an Archive Drive. How long ago did you purchase yours? I had already pulled the trigger on the hubs, until I found this out. I don't think it will be an issue but I'm guessing these are just like the AE drives I was going to purchase right?

Perhaps it is because of the 8TB capacity where mine are 4TB, but I just pulled mine last year (2016). I bought 8, 6 to use and 2 spares. All of them were as pictured.
The one they show being disasembled here: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Seagate+Backup+Plus+Hub+Disassembly/77495
I would guess it is the 8TB model that is the problem.

Edit:
Yes, Seagate Desktop drives only go up to 6TB. He got an Archive drive because he bought an 8TB model.
https://www.seagate.com/support/internal-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/desktop-hdd/

 

[Nomad]

Perhaps it is because of the 8TB capacity where mine are 4TB, but I just pulled mine last year (2016). I bought 8, 6 to use and 2 spares. All of them were as pictured.
The one they show being disasembled here: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Seagate+Backup+Plus+Hub+Disassembly/77495
I would guess it is the 8TB model that is the problem.

Edit:
Yes, Seagate Desktop drives only go up to 6TB. He got an Archive drive because he bought an 8TB model.
https://www.seagate.com/support/internal-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/desktop-hdd/

Well I bought 6TB so I'll post my results once they come in on Weds.

 

[mattheja]

Thanks everyone for your inputs. Unfortunately, I've decided to not buy new hardware and FreeNAS at this time. The prices and sacrifices for the travel size form factor just don't work for me. My current QNAP 2-bay, while not very hip and cool, does work. It's totally lame, but I'll wait a few years and build a badass storage array once the travel stuff is over and I'm stateside for several years (knock on wood). I learned a lot during my research about file systems and storage, so that was fun. cheers