My NAS to be: the selection of components

[Pvdbogaard]

Planning to build a NAS based on FreeNAS. Thinking of 6 2TB disks: 2 vdevs of each 2+1 (RAIDZ1). This would give me some IOPS capacity, storage capacity and redundancy.
Usage will be:
backup for Mac laptops and Hackintosh (I7 based)
storage for music, photo's and videos.
iSCSI volumes for Solaris 11 zones with Oracle database(s)

music and video will be streaming (of course); however the iSCSI is for database usage OLTPish (random read/writes of 8K blocks) Rest is file IO based.
No windows systems will be connected, only Macs and iPADs

Connection through 1Gig ethernet, two interfaces.
Probably eSATA connectivity too.

Motherboard will be equiped with 16GByte internal memory.

The two interface need to be able to give 250M/sec in the ideal situation.

Question(s):
I am thinking of 1155 Ivy Bridge CPU: either I3 322x or I5 3570. Would this be overkill? There is a small chance I will add 10Gbit networking interface (p2p to Hackintosh)
I prefer to run as noiseless as possible. System will be running 7x24. Would like lowest possible noise and power consumption while system needs to be able to handle above described load.

For IOPS I always preferred 7200RPM disks (10K and up are too expensive). Using a few Seagate 7200.12, and very happy with them.
Is this still the way to go when disks are in a NAS, or should I focus on price, powerconsumption, noise production etc since perhaps disks will not be my bottleneck given the above description?


Any recommendation on CPU, motherboard, disks, powersupply, case etc are very welcome!

BTW some day in the future I might buy a jail broken Apple TV3. Could be I need/would like some NAS CPU power for transcoding/etc of movies to play HDMI movies.

 

[cyberjock]

If you are wanting lowest power consumption you need to consider lower RPM drives.

I'm not sure what you are expecting from FreeNAS but AFAIK there is no ability to transcode movies from the NAS. Your local desktop will have to have the software to do that.

 

[Pvdbogaard]

If you are wanting lowest power consumption you need to consider lower RPM drives.

I'm not sure what you are expecting from FreeNAS but AFAIK there is no ability to transcode movies from the NAS. Your local desktop will have to have the software to do that.

Would it not be possible to use a jail for this, in which the transcoding etc would take place?

 

[cyberjock]

Maybe someday, but AFAIK there aren't any PBIs that support transcoding.

 

[Pvdbogaard]

Any feedback on the CPU I plan to use? Are the Ivy Core I3 or I5 good choices, or just power consuming overkill?

For the expected usage, which one would be preferable and why?

Question pops up since extraCPU capacity for movie transcoding is not needed given Noobsauce80 his response.

 

[bollar]

I don't have any experience with the exact components you're using, but it feels underpowered, especially since you have iSCSI in the mix and want 250MB/sec to go through the ports. My loads are also Macs and iSCSI. I found that ZFS writes are CPU intensive and wound up being a limiting factor in my configuration (Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2609 0 @ 2.40GHz / 32GB RAM).j If you're interested, I documented a lot of my findings here: Creating a Set of Benchmarks

 

[cyberjock]

My first first gen i3 (i3-530) can max out both of its Intel NIC ports simultaneously and still do more. I have zero tweaking on my server. It has 16GB of RAM with Autotune enabled. I'm not using iscsi, but that may be a big factor in performance. You'd have to chat with someone that actually uses iscsi and done lots of experiments on it to figure out if that is an issue.

 

[joeschmuck]

Yes, you could install any DLNA software that supports transcoding within the jail. Some folks have done that back in the 8.0.4 days and I'm sure in 8.3.0 as well. You don't need a plugin for it. I haven't done it myself yet because MiniDLNA works fine for me and I let my BluRay player do all the transcoding it needs to.

Not sure about your comment on possible upgrade to 10gbit network card. You can sink a few grand into that upgrade because it's not only a $400 card in the Freenas PC, it's the network switch and the PC's you want to place on that network. Maybe you have lots of money to do this, if so would you but me the same setup and I could test it for you .