BUILD MSI C236M

[Eric Dunn]

Hello FreeNAS community,

I’ve been doing a lot of reading of the community posts and FreeNAS documentation and have decided to embark upon my second FreeNas Build from scratch (reasons below).

Background

I’m an IT professional of 20 years the last 10 working in managerial positions and have recently started my own consultancy. I dabble in Linux, but mostly I'm a Windows guy (MCSE).

I have had a Home Theatre PC/TV System on my home network for about the last 12 years and about 7 years ago I reused an old HTPC as a NAS (FreeNAS) to store all my movies/tv/photos etc. I increased the drive space to 12TB about 5 years ago after some drive failures and upgraded it to v9 when v9 came out. The old NAS has done very well and I'm very pleased with it's performance.

At the end of last year, I started to use the NAS for storing documents etc. for my new business which changed the importance of security, data integrity, redundancy and backup etc. The old NAS has started having some issues and running very slow so I have decided to build a new NAS, copy all the data to it, and then rebuild/fix the old machine as a backup for the new one.

Proposed hardware

MB 1 x MSI C236M Micro ATX Workstation

CPU 1 x Intel Xeon E3 1220 V5

Memory 2 x KINGSTON KVR21E15D8/8HA, 8GB 2133MHZ DDR4 ECC CL15 DIMM 2RX8 HYNIX A

HDD 4 x 4TB Western Digital RED WD40EFRX 3.5in

SSD 2 x Kingston SSDNow V300 60Gb 2.5in

Case 1 x Fractal Design Node 804 (Black)

PSU 1 x Be Quiet L8 600W

UPS 1 x Eaton 5E

Reasoning

12TB of space with one redundant disk on Z1 with one should be plenty and speed is no great issue as long as I can stream movies over the network.

Xeon CPU, Server Chipset and 16 GB ECC RAM is strongly recommended

This MB supports all the above and has built in graphics

1 SSDs for OS backing up to the second as failover

Case is nice, quiet and cheap

600watt PSU exceeds requirements and “Be Quiet” is … quiet

Questions

Did I miss anything?

I’m not sure about the RAM, the Kingston site says it’s compatible, but it’s not on the MSI list of compatible RAM.

Should I consider going virtual on this hardware?

Is there any interest in my documenting the build as I go along.

Constructive criticism warmly received

Many thanks,

Eric.

 

[religiouslyconfused]

You don't need video out on freenas as there is no support for it. Would make a nice workstation board but I would go with a supermicro board or something like that. I would get 1 16gb dimm now that skylake now supports it as you can add another stick and get 32 gb of ram.

 

[Eric Dunn]

Thanks,
Would have gone with Supermicro but difficult & expensive to get Supermicro here in Sydney.
Not sure what you mean by "don't need video out on freenas" can you explain please?

 

[religiouslyconfused]

Maybe I confused the onboard graphics with the video out. FreeNAS has no video drivers really, so if you were to transcode video with Plex, it would use the CPU as Quick sync is not supported. Most people tend to use just 1 SSD boot as it is already more reliable than USB, but you can mirror your boot drive if you want. I like the case though, as Fractal makes some nice product and my main desktop has a Define XL R2 case, which is big and heavy, but easy to work with. I also read that you should not use Raid Z1 with drives over 1TB as it can cause problems. Most prefer to use Raid Z2 though, but you can use Z1 if you want. It is just not as popular anymore. I am also in the process of getting the components procured for my FreeNAS and I have been reading everything. Then again I typed that post on my mobile phone, and did it rather quickly. Streaming takes virtually no performance hike and I am not sure if you are using Plex, but Transcoding does tax the CPU. You should be able to get a few 1080p transcodes without any problem.

 

[religiouslyconfused]

I also noticed that your CPU does not have onboard graphics, so no need for a video out or onboard graphics, as the chip is not a 12x5 variant which those do have the onboard graphics.

 

[xJem]

Hi,
Was your build successful ? After a lot of research, I'm seriously considering this MSI C236M Workstation motherboard too. It's afforable and has true ECC support. (Super Micro boards prices are also extremely high where I live).

My concern is that Realteck NIC have a very, very bad reputations (it's a RTL8111H here, don't know for that particular one). Nothing that couldn't be solved with a PCI adaptor ? What about Wake up LAN ?

Is that case really, really silent ? Seems like the Fractal R4 and 5 are quiter.

 

[religiouslyconfused]

I would just get an Intel LAN, as even a desktop PCIe one will work just fine. No need for server grade stuff, unless you can get a good deal on a server lan chip. I can find an intel PCIe desktop card for like 20 USD on ebay.

 

[Eric Dunn]

Hi people,
Apologies, the build has been put on hold for a while due to cash-flow issues.
The only reason for mentioning the built-in graphics is that you need somewhere to connect a monitor to see what is happening while building the machine and it's a bonus not to have to add a card to do that... also the FD case only has two slots in the back.
I use a Fractal Design Node 804 (White) for my HTPC with 2 mirrored SSDs, an FM2 AMD motherboard and ANTEC PSU. It is beautiful, sits inside the cupboard of my TV stand which has no back and a vented glass door and is so quiet I cannot hear it over the ambient noise in the room - and I am very sensitive to background noise during the quiet bits in movies.

I still intend building the new NAS but the old NAS is still chugging away ok and it's now become urgent to replace the failing and difficult SBS2008 with a box to run my network and Office365 business subscription on Win2012 Essentials R2.

 

[Stux]

Thanks,
Would have gone with Supermicro but difficult & expensive to get Supermicro here in Sydney.
Not sure what you mean by "don't need video out on freenas" can you explain please?

Newegg delivers to Au now. Where I got my board from. The SuperMicro boards with IPMI have built in vgs graphics which work with the built in network kvm. Sufficient for console access.

Would recommend 5 or 6 disks in raidz2 rather than 4 in raidz1. I consider the chance of a single block error too high when doing a rebuild if a drive fails with raidz1 and large disks too high.

Raidz2 can have many block failures during a rebuild as long as they're not coincident across spindles.

Edit: replied to a 4 month old post. Oh well.

 

[Eric Dunn]

Ok finally revisiting this.
I now have access to SuperMicro motherboards and am looking at the X11SSM-F which has capacity for 8 SATA3 drives.
I have been doing a lot of reading on the merits of Z1 vs Z2 and it seems that Z2 is the way to go however it would seem that RAIDZ2 vdevs should have 4, 6, or 10 devices in each vdev not 8. Can anyone explain why?

 

[Spearfoot]

Ok finally revisiting this.
I now have access to SuperMicro motherboards and am looking at the X11SSM-F which has capacity for 8 SATA3 drives.
I have been doing a lot of reading on the merits of Z1 vs Z2 and it seems that Z2 is the way to go however it would seem that RAIDZ2 vdevs should have 4, 6, or 10 devices in each vdev not 8. Can anyone explain why?

You must have found one of the older articles making this recommendation owing to the fixed block sizes that used to obtain, but nowadays we have compresssion and those constraints no longer apply. So there is no reason not to use RAIDZ2 with any number of drives from the minimum (4) up to whatever prudent upper bound you're comfortable with; most experienced users would switch to RAIDZ3 at some point (12 or more drives, say) or create a pool made up of two RAIDZ2 vdevs.

Note that there are good reasons not to make vdevs that are too 'wide', one being that IOPS scale with the number of vdevs in a pool. So a 12-drive pool made up of a pair of 6-drive RAIDZ2 vdevs will have twice the IOPS of a single 12-drive RAIDZ3 vdev.

I have one of my systems configured with a 7-drive RAIDZ2 vdev and it works fine. You won't have any problems configuring your system with an 8-drive RAIDZ2 vdev.

Good luck!