New Build - Low Power Consumption - HDD Recommendations

[D-Joe]

Hi,

I want to build a NAS System with a low power consumption but which is also capable of maxing out gigabit LAN.

Here are the component I have choosen so far:

CPU: Intel Core i3-2120T, 2x2.6 GHz

Board: ASUS P8B75-M LX

RAM: G.Skill DIMM Kit 16GB PC3-10667U 2x 8GB

PSU: Super Flower Golden King Platinum 550W

The build should have 5 HDD so I choose the Asus Board, because it has 5 built in SATA Ports.

This build should be running 24/7 so the power consumption in idle should be realy low.

As HDD I found the Seagate SV35.5 with 3 TB which should have a very low power consumption in idle mode, I also found the WD Red 3TB which is designed to be used in a NAS-System.

My questions are:

Does anyone have any recommendations which of this two HDDs I should use?
Is there any problem using the 4k sector WD HDD in FreeNAS?

If you have any other recommendations for HDDs or other components please post them.

Regards.

 

[Stephens]

If I were buying today, I'd probably go WD Red. FreeNAS works with 4k sectors just fine. During setup, you can tell it to use 4K sectors.

 

[jgreco]

That power supply, check the 80Plus listings. If that's the one that's listed as platinum, you might see if you can score a gold rated unit instead for a little extra power savings (but the cost differential might be not worth it).

 

[batpot]

Why not save a bit with this motherboard instead:
http://www.asus.com/Server_Workstation/Server_Motherboards/P8BX/

And add a little more security with ECC memory?

 

[batpot]

Oh, and it just so happens that Kingwin's LZP-550 (which is based on that Super Flower PSU), is on sale at newegg right now for $113.

But as jgreco said, how long will the ~$50 premium of a platinum over gold PSU take to pay itself off?

 

[batpot]

I was going to start a new thread but figured I could continue the (original) discussion here...

Would you go WD Red or WD Black?

Is there a noticeable difference in performance?

You give up a good amount of heat and power by going black, but the additional 2 years of warranty plus a noticeable performance bump might be worth the sacrifice.

 

[jgreco]

What will your access mix be? How many disks will there be?

A lot of clients constantly accessing a lot of small files? Faster seeks might be better (though with ZFS, L2ARC probably better yet if the accesses are reads).

One or two clients accessing large files a few times a minute? Slower drives are quite sensible. The difference in access speed over a network to a NAS isn't going to be noticeable.

The main case where the WD Black's would be demanded by the design would be lots of small writes being made constantly by lots of clients. Both blacks and reds should be able to do sequential reads faster than you can do anything with the data over a gigE network connection, and L2ARC is faster by far than both for random reads, assuming an L2ARC large enough to fit the working set.

 

[FireWire2]

Low power and FAST!

Hi,

I want to build a NAS System with a low power consumption but which is also capable of maxing out gigabit LAN.

Here are the component I have choosen so far:

CPU: Intel Core i3-2120T, 2x2.6 GHz

Board: ASUS P8B75-M LX

RAM: G.Skill DIMM Kit 16GB PC3-10667U 2x 8GB

PSU: Super Flower Golden King Platinum 550W

The build should have 5 HDD so I choose the Asus Board, because it has 5 built in SATA Ports.

This build should be running 24/7 so the power consumption in idle should be realy low.

As HDD I found the Seagate SV35.5 with 3 TB which should have a very low power consumption in idle mode, I also found the WD Red 3TB which is designed to be used in a NAS-System.

My questions are:

Does anyone have any recommendations which of this two HDDs I should use?
Is there any problem using the 4k sector WD HDD in FreeNAS?

If you have any other recommendations for HDDs or other components please post them.

Regards.

This is what I built base on FreeNAS to stream severals BD.ISO at the same time
http://www.mpcclub.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22898&page=4

The whole 40TB system consumption is 180W +/- 3W when it actives.

It's rather fast 200MB/s+ when Bonding the GbE

 

[D-Joe]

Thanks for your help.

I would like to make a small change to the build and use 10 HDD instead of 5.

So my question is which mainboard would you use or would you switch to a controler card?

Thanks

 

[FireWire2]

Since the NAS does not requires lots of CPU power, but ON 24/7 so power consumption should be a major criteria.

I would suggested you use MB
1x http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007MS9OI2/?tag=ozlp-20
2x http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004JPHAF0/?tag=ozlp-20
or
2x http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004JPUZWU/?tag=ozlp-20

These hardware RAID will saturated the Gb Ethernet easily...

Matter of fact I highly recommend to bonding mode - Load Balance to increase the bandwidth