BUILD Mini-ITX with 4 Disks and low power consumption

[loch_nas]

Hi community,

After deciding that FreeNAS suits all my needs for storing my home and work data, I would like to verify my selection of hardware.

Here's my selection:

• 1x Supermicro A1SAi-2750F
  • with Intel Atom C2750 8-core
• 4x Western Digital WD Red 4TB
  • RAID 1 + 0
• 2x Crucial SO-DIMM 8GB, DDR3L-1600, CL11, ECC (CT102472BF160B)
• 1x Sea Sonic G-Series G-360 360W ATX 2.3 (SSR-360GP)
• 1x Noctua NF-A6x25-PWM
  • for CPU cooling if needed
• 2x SanDisk Ultra 16GB
  • mirrored boot device
• 1x APC Back-UPS ES 700VA

What I already have:

• alu case with a 4-bay hot-swap drive cage and 1 front intake fan (14 mm)
• a lot of fans for air-flow optimization
• some external hard disks for back up

Tasks of the system:

• clean and reliable data storage and data share for 2 to 3 people
• compression of data
• cloud server for 2 to 3 people
• max. 2 virtual machines (jail) mostly for testing

At the moment I have about 1,7 TB of more or less important data.
My plan is to swap the 4 TB Disks with 6 TB Disks if I reach about 60% of usable disk space.
The USV APC Back-UPS ES may not be the best choice, but it's not very expensive and I think that a cheap USV is better than nothing.
I have chosen a mainboard with the Atom C2750, because I want to buid a FreeNAS system with low power consumption. This system will run 24 hours per day.


My questions about my selected hardware:

Will the Intel Atom C2750 8-core suit my needs or should I rather have a look at the ASRock Rack E3C226D2I bundled with a i3 or Xeon CPU?
I surely want to keep the system rather small and simple and so I'm hoping to hit the sweet spot of my needs with the Atom 8-core (for this moment of life).

Is the 4x GB Lan Controller of the Supermicro A1SAi-2750F fully compatible with FreeNAS?

Are there any other concerns about my selection?


Thanks in advance!

 

[loch_nas]

Obviously I've broken a rule. While I was asking myself which rule, I did some more research and found out that my selected mainboard is not supporting FreeBSD :(
Would it help if I swap the Supermicro A1SAi-2750F with ASRock C2750D4I? That's the only recommended freenas mini-itx board ...

The Problem about this mainboard is its Marvel-Controller, which consumes 10W more. And the question is, if a board like the ASRock E3C224D2I paired with a Intel i3-4150 or a Xeon e3-1220 v3 isn't the better option.

There are some guys running Freenas on a Supermicro A1SAi-2750F. The only problem i could find is a problem when running/installing win7 virtually in a jail. I really don't need to run win7 on freenas :)

The good thing about the Asrock boards is that they support FreeBSD.

I really would appreciate any suggestions about the selection of the right hardware, especially since I'm a total FreeNAS-Novice. Finding freenas hardware in mini-itx isn't that easy as I initially thought.

Thanks for any help!

 

[Ericloewe]

I did some more research and found out that my selected mainboard is not supporting FreeBSD

Wha? That's not right, plenty of people have used it.

In fact, your setup looks ok. The C2750 is generally faster than an i3 for typical workloads.

Is the 4x GB Lan Controller of the Supermicro A1SAi-2750F fully compatible with FreeNAS?

I assume it's the C2750's integrated controller. i350something. It should be, since pfSense has been working well with it for a while.

 

[loch_nas]

Thanks very much .... that's what I wanted to hear :)

Wha? That's not right, plenty of people have used it.

I have read yesterday something about that ... can't find that thread right now.
Apart from that I've looked at the OS compatibility list on Supermicro website and have seen that my desired board at least supports FreeBSD 10.0.

Nice to read that there's no problem with the NICs ... I had concerns about its driver, because the controller seems to be quite new.

So now I can take the final steps, like the selection of a suitable OS drive. Since USB 3.0 is not supported by Freenas, I would only have 2 USB-Ports on the A1SAi-2750F, seated at the Backpanel. A closer look at those 2 ports and my selected USB-Sticks (SanDisk Ultra) tells me, that those sticks are too thick. There are smaller sticks, but they often are crappy and get very hot.
And after reading this ...

If I were the boss and what I said was how things went, I would start recommending SATA DOMs and SSDs first if reliability is important (yes, even over mirrored USBs), and secondly go for USB if there are other bigger problems. SATA DOMs are not excessively expensive (my 32GB SATA DOM was $55 or so) and it was a good $55 spent as I have had no issues so no downtime, no hassle, and no need to do an RMA or buy yet another USB stick.

I do have a USB based FreeNAS system still, and I hate the thing (passionately). It's horribly unreliable, has problems with updating at times (I always do it from the CLI because the GUI often times-out and the upgrade fails mid-way through), and is generally just a pain to deal with. I avoid shutting it down, I avoid rebooting it, and I avoid upgrading it because I never know if its going to actually work or require 2 or 3 tries.

I have decided to take a look at SATA DOMs. So would the following SATA-DOM be ok?
http://www.mx-technology.com/en/industrial/ssd.php?sid=20

The only available (Austria/Germany) alternative to that would be a SSD like Crucial BX100 120GB. If the SATA-DOM is not worth the money, I would take the SSD.

Thanks again for your time and knowledge!

 

[cyberjock]

That SATA DOM looks okay. I'd go with a 16GB or 32GB if I were you. An 8GB is kind of minimal, and may not be a good choice when FreeNAS 10 comes.

My personal recommendation for people looking for long-term stability while trying to plan ahead for some reasonable future upgrades should do SATA DOM or SSD with 16GB minimum and 32GB recommended.

 

[loch_nas]

Thanks for reply ... Yep, I would have taken the 32GB-Version anyway.

So my setup is now:
1x Supermicro A1SAi-2750F
4x Western Digital WD Red 4TB
2x Crucial SO-DIMM 8GB, DDR3L-1600, CL11, ECC (CT102472BF160B)
1x Sea Sonic G-Series G-360 360W ATX 2.3 (SSR-360GP)
1x Noctua NF-A6x25-PWM
1x 32GB SATA-DOM (MXSSD2MSLD-V)
1x APC Back-UPS ES 700VA

After ordering, building together and testing this hardware, I will give some feedback about the system.

Thanks again for the qualified support!

 

[Jailer]

I would add more memory if you want to run a couple of VM's.

Also if you know you plan on going to 6TB drives why not just save up a little more and start your build with them?

Also read the noobs guide linked in Cyberjocks sig for a thorough explanation of the RAID options for your build. Once you've read the guide you'll be in a better position to make an informed decision on what RAID level you want to go with based on your own data value and risk assessment.

 

[loch_nas]

I would add more memory if you want to run a couple of VM's.

I only want to run rather small VMs for testing ... I want to keep the system small and simple to minimze the chance of problems. For running productive VMs I would build a seperate system with ESXi.

Also if you know you plan on going to 6TB drives why not just save up a little more and start your build with them?

That's true and I know that, but I cannot afford the price difference at the moment. I would have to wait one or two months and there are many other things I have to get, like furniture for the flat.
Apart from this the 4TB disks will be enough for a while. I have plans of building a second freenas server with higher capacity. This will maybe happen next year, before the disk space of the first freenas server becomes problematic. I'll see if I need to swap the 4TB disks with 6TB disks. And I actually have to buy at least 6 Disks for a 4 bay system to have at least 2 Spare Disks.

Also read the noobs guide linked in Cyberjocks sig for a thorough explanation of the RAID options for your build. Once you've read the guide you'll be in a better position to make an informed decision on what RAID level you want to go with based on your own data value and risk assessment.

Yes, I will surely do that and have done already a lot of reading until now. At this point I am quite sure to use Raid10. There is space for 4 Disks ... I would prefer at least 6 disks for raidz2. Very important data must be backed up on multiple devices anyway.

Thanks again!