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.
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.