New Freenas build with a question

[Djdiddles]

Hi everybody! I've been a user of freenas for about a year and absolutely love it. It's a fantastic NAS OS and works wonderfully in my environment.

Currently I have my freenas rig running 6x1TB drives and 6x2TB in ZFS raid-z2, respectively. Main OS drive is a 5400rpm 2.5inch laptop drive. It currently is running on a core2duo @ 3ghz with 4gigs of ram :( . I know I know... it's pretty sad for the os drive and ram, but this was a test bed system to see if it would work in my environment.

The uses for this build is to serve all my media across my network, over my internet connection, support LACP, an always on, and near silent. It will be tasked with also functioning with all the great plugins the community have come up with and implement including SABnzb.

That being said, I had some extra hardware I wasn't using so I decided, I would throw down on a new build. Now Keep in mind this is just hardware I had at my disposal but should be high end enough to increase my speeds noticeably.

What I have on hand already:

1) Motherboard: Asus KGPED16
2) Processor(s): AMD 6134 (8)cores (I have two of them installed)
3) RAM: 16gigs of DDR3 1600ram (with this processor, the ram will only run at a speed of 1333)
4) OS drive: OCZ 30gig SSD SataII drive
5) Case: Supermicro 16 hot swap bays (got it on ebay)
6) Corsair TX850watt psu

Now I know people must be saying this is overkill or w/e. Like I said, I already had the hardware. There are a few questions I had which pertain to the setup:

First: Is freenas limited on the number of processors/cores supported? since the motherboard will support 16core processors, I could easily upgrade down the road for a 32core rig.

Second: Is there a hard drive # limit? I've heard people installing a LSI card (sas expander). I was thinking I could later build a DAS and install a LSI card and just expand this system without having to do the whole thing over (motherboard, processors, ect.)

Third: Since I'm looking to have two ZFS-Z2 storage volumes containing 8drives each, will the hard drive speeds of each drive really matter? 5400rpm over 7200rpm?

Any help or advice will be greatly appreciated and wanted. Please chime in and let me know if I'm going about this build in the wrong direction.

 

[pirateghost]

Please do you have a link for that case? How much was it?

 

[Djdiddles]

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/3u/933/sc933t-r760.cfm

that's the case but in black. I got mine pretty cheap for $300 bucks. If you hunt around on ebay, you'll find some old ones that people are getting rid of.

 

[cyberjock]

First: Is freenas limited on the number of processors/cores supported? since the motherboard will support 16core processors, I could easily upgrade down the road for a 32core rig.

Unless you plan to have 100s of users, 16 cores is so far beyond overkill its disgusting. An i3 with 4 cores can saturate dual Gb NICs simultaneously. But yes, you are limited by the number of cores supported by FreeBSD 8.3, which I believe is 256 or 512. Honestly, if I were in your situation and you could remove or otherwise disable 1 processor I probably would just for power savings.

Second: Is there a hard drive # limit? I've heard people installing a LSI card (sas expander). I was thinking I could later build a DAS and install a LSI card and just expand this system without having to do the whole thing over (motherboard, processors, ect.)

The only limit is the number of SATA ports you can connect to your machine.

Third: Since I'm looking to have two ZFS-Z2 storage volumes containing 8drives each, will the hard drive speeds of each drive really matter? 5400rpm over 7200rpm?

Just like the first answer. Unless you plan to have 100s of users or run 10Gb NICs and hope to saturate it, no. Personally, I wouldn't go with 7200 RPM drives for always on. They run much hotter(and cooling can become an issue in high hard drive density cases) and they draw alot more power(which when multiplied over many drives can add up to alot of watts).


In some ways, you would almost be better off selling your machine and downsizing to something more appropriate for your environment. Aside from the case, everything else just screams of lots of wasted power, lots of extra heat and extra stuff that could potentially fail later. Those PSUs are not efficient at all(they're not even rated for 80%+). But, like you said.. you already have it. If you tried to give it to me for a FreeNAS server I'd probably turn down the offer unless I could sell it to build something appropriate for home use.

You also made a comment about it being "near silent". From personal experience with systems like yours, I would never have considered a server like that for "near silent" use. The triple redundant power supplies, the number of hard drives you can install, the number of fans installed in that case, and the number of CPUs will make for a small oven and alot of noise. I built a similar system myself with a Norco case, 1 CPU, and WD Green drives for power savings and lower noise due to slower drives and lower speed cooling fans and it is still far from silent. I don't think you could modify your setup enough to be as quiet as mine and if you had to sit within 10 feet of my system you'd clearly be able to hear it running. Then when its not running the room "feels" empty because of the lack of noise.

 

[Djdiddles]

Thank you very much for the extensive reply!

I have taken what you've said to heart and had to do some searching around but I found my AMD x3 720 triple core processor. I figured it would work great in my environment and just picked up a AMD AM3 Foxcon Motherboard and loaded it up with 16gigs of ram.

I'm ordering the Western Digital 2tb Red drives once a week to help spread out the build cost but all in all I have 4 drives on hand with another 3 on the way. I'm still looking at which Raid Controller card I should go with so i'm still up in the air with that.

After doing so searching I found a PSU that will work well in my case and isn't full size. I removed the triple redundant PSU's and put in a Micro-ATX psu so I should be covered there.

I have the SSD I'm going to use for the ZFS cache drive and I just need to get a thumb drive for the OS and I think the build is finished.

Thanks a ton for the help and I really appreciate the help!