Motherboard help for Pentium G2120 NAS build

[II GAV II]

Hi guys

I'm new on here so apologies if this is in the wrong place - it seemed like the best spot.

So, I'm building a freeNAS purely for media streaming (1080p included) to a couple of clients (smart TV and an iPad) and storage (movies, tv series, family photos/ videos) - nothing too complicated at all. The amount of data at present is minimal as I'm just starting out so I've planned about 4tb to begin with. I've obsessed over getting the balance of performance versus economy exact, as the NAS is only ever going to be for this stuff, but might need extra HDDs in the future. So a motherboard with a minimum of 4 SATAs is needed. The processor is going to be a Pentium G2120 (ivy bridge), with 8gb of low voltage RAM at the max Mhz the motherboard can handle, once chosen... which brings me on to my question.

Can anyone provide a little guidance on motherboards for this build?

I want it to have an intel gigabit lan as I understand this works better but is it necessary for my build as they boards are a lot more expensive relatively speaking?

Any help much appreciated.

Thanks
Gav

 

[jgreco]

You can find very inexpensive boards, but you're encouraged not to do so. You get what you pay for.

There's a sticky in the hardware forum that offers some advice for good socket 1155 components. I believe the Supermicro boards there will work with the G2120, but haven't verified that. Those boards are typically a better choice and also a bit less expensive than similar other boards. Get ECC memory if your CPU supports it.

 

[II GAV II]

Thanks for posting.

I believe I've looked at that sticky as I've spent a number of hours researching this part of the build! I'd love one of those boards and understand the quality versus cost axiom; but, they are just too expensive.

Can you (or anyone else for that matter) suggest or direct me to some half decent consumer level boards that will do what is not going to be overly heavy work (streaming a couple of movies/ tv shows per week, downloading torrents)?

 

[jgreco]

Not really, because those boards *are* my idea of inexpensive boards. You can find "consumer" grade boards for less, but by the time you get done with the frustration of fighting with a Realtek ethernet that has odd problems, you go out and buy a $35 Intel CT card, and suddenly you're in the price range of the Supermicro, except that you only have a single Intel ethernet and dodgy support for things like ECC.

FIVE SECONDS with Google show the X9SCL-F at $146.99.

Yes, you can get an ASRock H61M-DGS for $44.99. However, that only supports 16GB, only 4x SATA 3Gbps, fantastic Realtek ethernet, and the awesome expandability of a PCIe x16 that's meant for a video card. Not to pick on any particular mfr... I just happened to run the NewEgg product selector and go for the cheapest product.

Sigh.

 

[survive]

Hi II GAV II,

The first question I have is do you have the CPU yet? Any other components?

Next thing to keep in mind is that zfs (I'm assuming you want to run zfs) doesn't do pool expansion the way you might expect....you can't add additional drives one by one & grow the pool, you need to add in additional "virtual devices". I'm telling you this now because you might want to plan on getting all the disks you plan on using up front because expanding a small pool (e.g. going from four drives to six) can be a little inefficient.

So what sort of board do you want to get? The cheap Intel "H61" & "B" series chipsets like jgreco linked to above only that are found on the cheapest boards come with 4 sata ports...if that's all you need I would still spend a few bucks more and get something like a Gigabyte "Ultra-Durable" board.

If all you need are 4 ports and don't have any of the other parts yet why not look at an HP Mircoserver? They are everything you need to make a quiet reliable 4 drive NAS & even support ECC memory & have a higher-class Broadcom NIC. HP is introducing a new generation of Microservers in a few weeks so if you can wait the current models should start going on sale soon.

If you could tell us a little bit more about what you want to do over all it would be much easier to make a better recommendation.

-Will

 

[cyberjock]

As jgreco said, you absolutely get what you pay for. Lots of people buy the cheap boards. Many of them find they end up spending 20+ hours just trying to get FreeNAS to run, many give up and return it(and lose money for return shipping, etc etc etc) and end up with the more expensive board anyway. Others get it working, then realize the hardware isn't compatible and they lost their zpool and have no backup.

The server will store your precious data. If you feel your data is safe with a $50 motherboard, feel free to make the jump. Its your data to keep or lose. I will tell you I'd never ever go cheap on components for my server. No way I want to risk my precious data and be one of those "lost my data just to save a few bucks" crowd.

You know what else is cheap? Just deleting all of your data and not even building a server. :P

 

[II GAV II]

Hi Will/ Cyberjock/ jgreco

Firstly of all, thank you for replying, I appreciate it.

I really do get the quality versus cost issue and take this approach in everything I do - thing is, we live in England and Supermirco boards seem to be more much expensive by around 50%! So the board that you recommended Will, for example, is £145 (Amazon - which is generally the cheapest place in this country for most purchases) which is around $215 - I just don't have the money for that (well, if I want to keep my testicles attached to my body anyway!). My wife is all for the NAS but we moved house recently (hence new media center creation for 3 smart TVs w/ 7.1 dolby digital sound ;-)) and there are demands on our cashflow. I've probably got about £400 (say $550-575) to spend on the NAS build give or take. I'm completely open to your ideas to pull something together that might be a different spec to what I was thinking, providing it stays within this budget... below is where I've got so far.

CPU: the new Pentium G2120 - £60
Motherboard: ?
HDD: 2x 2TB WD Red (but not sure now after your point about expanding, although was going to use cloud backup with say Livedrive so no need for any redundancy?) - £160
RAM: 1x 8GB Kingston HyperX 1600Mhz/ 1333Mhz (depends on what motherboard supports obviously) - this might be low voltage although I'm not entirely convinced it's necessary for our needs? - £40
Case: Cooler Master Elite 120 (£35) (although I'd prefer a Bitfenix Prodigy (£65) or Fractal Design Define Mini)
PSU: Corsair CX430M - £40 (prob. don't need this much power do I? but to be honest, lower power ones are not much cheaper)

So... current cost is (w/out mobo, and with Cooler Master case) £335. This leaves £65 ($100) for a mobo - NOW, if the supermicro mobo that you recommend was actually $146 in this godforsaken country in which I live, I'd stretch the budget (£30 is really not an issue) BUT as I said it isn't unfortunately.

Hopefully you can see the challenge? (we have a little boy and another on the way any week now so budgets are budgets, and for good reason)

This aside, what do you think of the spec I've put together?

 

[cyberjock]

The specs seem okay. The HDD redundancy may be an issue. I'm not sure how cloud backup will work with 1TB+ of data backed up. I can't imagine uploading and later downloading that much data. I've never used or heard of Livedrive but I assume its not compatible with FreeBSD and you plan to use it via a desktop accessing the server via FreeNAS.

The rule I follow when building for people is "Do it right the first time. Building it right the second time after you've lost your data isn't that much fun." While I acknowledge your money limitations, it could be that FreeNAS isn't for you. I'm not trying to push you away, but I think you should consider if there are any other options you should explore before buying your hardware. Your budget is severely limiting for what you are wanting and it would suck if you spent all this money, lost your data, and then were looking to spend even more money to get a server to do what you want.

 

[II GAV II]

Hi cyberjock

The cloud backup should work because right now I don't have much data at all - the media collection will grow slowly but surely going forward, meaning the back up to such as Livedrive or any other half decent cloud service will be incremental. 2TB of cloud with Livedrive is £7 per month ($10 or so), so no problem at all. I'll also use an external HDD to back up family stuff again so we'll have two backups of our memoirs. I think you're right about using a desktop/ laptop accessing my NAS to do this though; I have to admit I wasn't sure about how cloud backup services would talk to the freeNAS.

I've considered all the options and ended up at this one because in order to stream 1080p from a Synology NAS, for example, it would cost in excess of £600 and would be no where near as powerful as the spec above. So, I'm going this route and will find a solution... which brings me on to something I've just found this morning.

Intel do a range of motherboards (obviously) and some of them have enough SATA ports (4 minimum for me), an Intel gigabit lan and support upto 16gb/ 32gb RAM. The older H61 chipset doesn't support RAID, but for me that isn't a problem really as I wasn't planning on this anyway. I'm going to look at these boards but with the newer chipsets to see what they cost, but so far this is looking like a possible solution. Not sure how to put a hyperlink in this post :o so apologies if this doesn't work...

£60 - cheap for a reason,but has an intel gigbit LAN unbelievably (cheap boards seem to always have Realtek gigashit)
Intel DH61CR - http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/desktop-motherboards/desktop-board-dh61cr.html

This one is a much better chipset obviously and has everything (I THINK!); only £30 more which I can live with
Intel DH77EB - http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/desktop-motherboards/desktop-board-dh77eb.html

Intel motherboards that frankly I can't see a lot wrong with - Am I missing something guys?

 

[jgreco]

As long as you can live with the somewhat limited expandability of something like the DH77EB, you're likely to find it a much more pleasant experience than some random board. Do note that this board has one of the SATA-II ports redirected as eSATA. Between that and lack of ECC support, I can't actually recommend it, but I'll say that it's a great find in the sea of marginal desktop quality boards.

 

[II GAV II]

Why thank you jgreco! I'll take that as a compliment bearing in mind I've only got two weeks of self-researched knowledge on this. I understand your points, but for me they really are not an issue as I doubt I'll never need more than 4 ports to be honest, and would have an easy 5th on hand if so. Lack of ECC is something I understand, and in an ideal world I'd spec it in the build. But again, for what it will be used for it is not necessary - I'd be gutted if my media library corrupted but it's not life and death, and will be backed up on the cloud (Livedrive).

I'm going to go with it and at around £80-90 delivered feel like it is a decent find. Thank you for your input and help mate.

Gav