mITX advice.

[crazychimpjimb]

Hello

Query to you very knowledgeable people. Im looking to build a NAS based on a mITX board in a small case so that I can fit it onto a shelve under the stairs out the way. I only use this as a NAS and SMB for file storage. I might look at remote access at a later date but I've never seen my 8th gen i7 run at more than 5%, The 32gb of RAM however thats a different story hahah.

So First question is for simple SMB storage on a mirrored setup i5 vs i7 is there a massive difference that I've over looked?

Second why did i mention i5 well Im struggling to find a mITX board for 8th gen so may need to buy into 10th or 11th gen as that's readily available.

Space is the main reason at the moment as if I had the space I would be using a Full Tower, room for expansion for more drives etc but sff is key for this build.

If your interested my build is a Lian Li q58 case, 400w SFX power supply, mITX board?, Processor unknown pending wise wisdom?, 2x 5TB 2.5hdd Seagate Barracuda (extra £10 in the UK each over the 4TB solution), Ram 32GB unknown what at the moment and finally using the 1 PCIe slot a 10GB Asus XG-C100C card for faster connectivity. The case I will hands up say I saw it on face book for £30 as the mesh panels had damage and couldn't turn that offer down!

Any advice in the right direction will be amazing :)

James

 

[ChrisRJ]

With SFF disks you need to check for SMR drives. Those are utterly unsuitable for ZFS.

 

[crazychimpjimb]

With SFF disks you need to check for SMR drives. Those are utterly unsuitable for ZFS.

Would using the intel raid on motherboards be a more suitable solution in this case although I did read some negative comments regarding raid controllers over truenas and zfs? I would assume if your using hardware raid you avoid using any form of software raid as surely that's a recipe for chaos.

 

[ChrisRJ]

That's a big no-no! Please look into "Don't use RAID" from the recommended readings in my signature

 

[NugentS]

Just to echo what @ChrisRJ is saying
RAID = No, Just No
SFF disks are almost always SMR which are totally unsuitable for NAS use.

The other issue to consider putting the NAS under the stairs is heat. Heat kills things, disks and PSU's in particular. Most of the rest will be fine.

Also the Asus 10Gb Nic is an Aquantia chipset I believe. This is not well supported on FreeBSD - you might do better with Scale. However if you have issues (and you may well do so) be prepared to be told to buy a proper NIC (Intel Server NIC)

 

[crazychimpjimb]

Just to echo what @ChrisRJ is saying
RAID = No, Just No
SFF disks are almost always SMR which are totally unsuitable for NAS use.

The other issue to consider putting the NAS under the stairs is heat. Heat kills things, disks and PSU's in particular. Most of the rest will be fine.

Also the Asus 10Gb Nic is an Aquantia chipset I believe. This is not well supported on FreeBSD - you might do better with Scale. However if you have issues (and you may well do so) be prepared to be told to buy a proper NIC (Intel Server NIC)

Heat shouldn't be an issue. Plenty of through air as its not a cupboard instead a shelve in the main hall way. The CPU is water cooled on a corsair h60i spare from a gaming rig which should help reduce heat.

Shame the card isnt supported as again im trying to get this small build. Looking like the readynas I had may have been the better solution hahahaa I have access to quite a lot of servers so currently the ones we a breaking for parts only have 1gb cards :(

Ill read into the RAID :)

Finally one thing I have noticed is most itx boards are clearly not ECC compatible so maybe i may have to scrap the whole plan look into cloud storage instead as I don't currently have the space for a tower size build!

 

[NugentS]

ECC, for a home NAS, is nice to have but is not required - just make sure you thrash the crap out of it first with memtest.
mITX usually has problems with PCIe slots and maximimum memory.

TrueNAS is not pitched at the consumer market so does not account for comsumer hardware. The fact that it runs on so much kit well is great - but its a business product and likes business grade hardware. Anything less and you are compromising your data to a greater or lesser extent.

In your case you are definately compromising:
1. No ECC - allowing potential silent corruption
2. SMR Disks - whilst they may work fine initially (as long as you don't trash them), when you have issues (and you will, everyone does) the problems will be compounded massively
3. Shitty NIC - unexpected and unwanted network behaviour - could be anything
4. Possibly use of shitty RAID - total loss of data. ZFS unable to do its work properly which is to keep data safe

The purpose of a NAS is to store files and provide them when required - you are compromising literally every aspect of that

I suggest you use something otherthan TrueNAS. a Linux OS with ext4 and SAMBA is probably your best option. I suppose you could use windows server.

Just make sure you have a good, tested, backup - you will need it

[apparently I am not allowed to swear]

 

[Samuel Tai]

mITX server boards with ECC support do exist, but aren't listed on the consumer products pages of the usual motherboard manufacturers.

1. Gigabyte: https://www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/Server-Motherboard?fid=2314
2. ASRock: http://asrockrack.com/general/products.asp#Server

 

[crazychimpjimb]

mITX server boards with ECC support do exist, but aren't listed on the consumer products pages of the usual motherboard manufacturers.

1. Gigabyte: https://www.gigabyte.com/Enterprise/Server-Motherboard?fid=2314
2. ASRock: http://asrockrack.com/general/products.asp#Server

cheers dude! Legend!