New Build

[Michael Mendoza]

Here is what I will be purchasing over the next week. Excited about the build. It will be replacing a QNAP-459pro. I will use the QNAP at a secondary location for backups. Any input would be appreciated!

PSU OCZ ZT550W ATX 550W Modular Power Supply - 80 plus Bronze $75
PSU SeaSonic G Series 550-Watt ATX 80 PLUS GOLD $80
MEMORY Samsung 8GB M391B1G73QH0-YK0 (4) $351
CASE Fractal Design NODE-804 $110.00
CPU Xeon E3-1270 v3 $225.00
MB Supermicro Motherboard MBD-X10SL7-F-O $243.00
HDS WD 4TB RED (8)$1400.00
FLASH Kingston Digital 8GB Data Traveler 3.0 USB Flash Drive $7.00
SanDisk Cruzer Fit 8GB USB 2.0 Low-Profile Flash Drive $6


Total $2,411.00

Thank you for the suggestions and reminding me about OCZ. You are absolutely right and I changed out the PSU. Will Freenas be able to use USB 3.0 in the near future? Will there be a performance hit using USB 2.0? Should I use a small SSD instead?

 

[Ericloewe]

Nice choices, but I recommend you don't go with OCZ. Not only is the quality of some of their units dubious, their business is in a sort of Limbo thanks to their bankruptcy and associated occurrences.

Get a Seasonic G-450 instead, you'll room for a couple more HDDs (~13 HDDs). If you'd like room for more, the G-550 is a trivial increase in cost.

If you're limited by the budget, something like the Corsair CS series has acceptable quality and does not have the threat of warranties that won't be honored.

You might encounter some problems booting from USB 3.0, if so, move the drive to a USB 2.0 port.

 

[Ziferius]

How is the build, Michael? Success stories are good :) I'm living vicariously through others at the moment.

 

[Michael Mendoza]

OK. I ended up getting Seagate 4TB NAS drives. One of them failed the second day. Waiting for replacement. The permissions in Freenas take some getting used to. I still haven't figured out how to set them for CIFs.

 

[Ziferius]

Good; so your memory worked fine.

 

[Michael Mendoza]

Good; so your memory worked fine.

Yes. It was on the approved memory list.

 

[Ziferius]

I was in your boat - I bought the memory. Just because Crucial said it would work -- doesn't make it so.
I was going by Supermicro's HCL..... it's definitely not on there. (Only Samsung, Hynix and Micron 8gb modules are on there.)

 

[Michael Mendoza]

I used the low voltage Samsung on supermicro's list. Works great.

 

[NewGuy]

Hi There,

I was looking at doing this build myself. How is it on plex streaming for 3 tv's at once and streaming etc? I wanted it for data storage and streaming/media server. I love the 8 HDD limit so I can start with 4 HDDs and move it to 8 when needed.

 

[Michael Mendoza]

Hi There,

I was looking at doing this build myself. How is it on plex streaming for 3 tv's at once and streaming etc? I wanted it for data storage and streaming/media server. I love the 8 HDD limit so I can start with 4 HDDs and move it to 8 when needed.

I love it. The thing is a beast. I am getting 120 MB/s transfer rates. I can stream 3 1080p ond only hit 80% of processor usage for less than a minute. After that, it goes to under 5%. I am running 8 HDD. I couldn't be happier with this setup. I am pulling my hair out trying to setup Zywall VPN 110 right now. I will use this for all connections to the NAS except to Plex. I think this requires a port forward.

I hope this helps.

 

[NewGuy]

Thanks a lot for the reply! I've sent you a pm or conversation... Also what did you use for a heatsink?

 

[NewGuy]

I have questions about the hard drives and the raid you've used but I didn't want to start my own thread because the rest of the hardware/build is the same as yours.

You have it listed that there's 8hdds. The motherboard has 8 SAS and 6 sata ports on it. So do you have 6 HDDs with 2 spares, or are you using the sas ports?

If I do 6 HDDs can I add 2 more later in a RAID2z?

I was reading the newbie powerpoint that somebody has on their siggy (forgot) and I noticed the zpools talk and I was going to configure everything into one pool had have the ability to lose 2x hard drives out for 6 or 8... is there a better way of doing it?

 

[Ericloewe]

I have questions about the hard drives and the raid you've used but I didn't want to start my own thread because the rest of the hardware/build is the same as yours.

You have it listed that there's 8hdds. The motherboard has 8 SAS and 6 sata ports on it. So do you have 6 HDDs with 2 spares, or are you using the sas ports?

If I do 6 HDDs can I add 2 more later in a RAID2z?

I was reading the newbie powerpoint that somebody has on their siggy (forgot) and I noticed the zpools talk and I was going to configure everything into one pool had have the ability to lose 2x hard drives out for 6 or 8... is there a better way of doing it?

What do the ports have to do with the drive setup? I'll answer that - nothing.

And no, you cannot expand RAIDZ/2/3 vdevs by adding more disks. Only by replacing all disks with larger ones.

 

[NewGuy]

What do the ports have to do with the drive setup? I'll answer that - nothing.

And no, you cannot expand RAIDZ/2/3 vdevs by adding more disks. Only by replacing all disks with larger ones.

Thanks for the response! One more question about the disk configuration if I may: For 8 disks what's the best configuration for performance/redundancy? 8 disks in raidz2 pool?

 

[Ericloewe]

Thanks for the response! One more question about the disk configuration if I may: For 8 disks what's the best configuration for performance/redundancy? 8 disks in raidz2 pool?

RAIDZ2 is the more popular option. RAIDZ3 is you're paranoid.

 

[ALFA]

Thanks for the response! One more question about the disk configuration if I may: For 8 disks what's the best configuration for performance/redundancy? 8 disks in raidz2 pool?

Please remember that if you go RAIDZ2 the recommend disk configuration are 4, 6, or 10 disks, 8 is not a good number.

 

[danb35]

With the near-universal use of compression, the 2^n+p rule is no longer applicable, or at least so say some of the main ZFS developers.

 

[NewGuy]

So does this mean that I should do 6 disks or 8 in 1 raidz2?

 

[cyberjock]

Honestly, 8 disks is fine. Unless you plan to run this as a high-end enterprise environment it won't matter. And even in that scenario it's a mixed bag how much you'd gain from what is an "optimal" pool.

 

[ALFA]

Honestly, 8 disks is fine. Unless you plan to run this as a high-end enterprise environment it won't matter. And even in that scenario it's a mixed bag how much you'd gain from what is an "optimal" pool.

Now you got me there cyberjock, for what I understand going with a "non-optimum" configuration could leads to performance issues and even also could lead in loss of capacity (fragmentation will be more noticeable than with those "optimum" configurations) this couldn't even lead to some misaligned ZFS sectors?