BUILD Noob building first home NAS - help selecting hardware!

[Raiz]

Thanks. Looks like I need to change my order. *sigh*

 

[NASbeginner]

Hey Raiz, were you able to get your order corrected? I can't wait to see how your build goes, as I have yet to order anything :)

 

[Raiz]

With a 15% restocking fee and self-paid shipping. *sigh*

I can't put anything together until Christmas. The woman wants to have something for me under the tree and this is it.... so the parts are sitting there waiting. I'm about 99% certain that I'll be missing something when I put it together and all the stores will be closed.

 

[NASbeginner]

:D Sounds like a fun Christmas morning of opening gifts at least :)

 

[Raiz]

Well, we are up and running.... sort of!

• 1 of the hard drives reported bad sectors, so that had to get replaced with a spare.
• The onboard video on the X11SSH-F mobo worked fine out of the box. No CPU video needed. I just connected a monitor and it worked.
• The Samsung RAM is fine. Should probably run MEMTEST.
• I couldn't boot from a USB flash drive as was expected due to the XHCI/EHCI issues in FreeBSD. Had to load FreeNAS onto a small Crucial SSD.
• USB mouse and keyboard worked fine however.
• IPMI was enabled out of the box. I just typed in 192.168.1.20 and it asked for my login and password.

Is a 2nd ethernet cable needed? FreeNAS didn't give me an IP address to log into for the GUI until I plugged in a 2nd ethernet. I had originally thought that IPMI would work for IPMI+ethernet.

Anyone else got an X11 board up and running?

 

[Ericloewe]

I had originally thought that IPMI would work for IPMI+ethernet.

No, but LAN1 can do LAN+IPMI (at least on X10 boards - it may be LAN2 on X11 boards).

 

[snicke]

Is your Skylake FreeNAS still working flawlessly @Raiz? I'm wondering since I'm about to build a similar Skylake FreeNAS according to this specification: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/please-review-my-intel-skylake-freenas-build.40711/

 

[Raiz]

Yep. It's been 100% uptime since I stopped screwing with it a couple weeks ago. I'm on travel right now and watching movies in my hotel room every night straight from the server at home.
The family really likes the shared Plex function as well as using ownCloud to access their stuff from wherever they are.

 

[snicke]

Yep. It's been 100% uptime since I stopped screwing with it a couple weeks ago. I'm on travel right now and watching movies in my hotel room every night straight from the server at home.
The family really likes the shared Plex function as well as using ownCloud to access their stuff from wherever they are.

Thanks for your report! :)

 

[snicke]

@Raiz One more thing. What do you think about the performance of your system from different perspectives (CPU, network, storage etc)? One of the differences to my build is that I'm going for RAIDZ3 though.

I'm also going with the X11SSM-F board instead of X11SSH-F, getting one more PCIe X4 compared to yours but having no M.2-connection. Otherwise the same. Are you using the M.2 connection?

 

[Raiz]

1. I haven't been able to max out the CPU. I wasn't even close with 6 1080p streams going. My network was completely maxed though, and wouldn't allow me to start a 7th stream. (Edit: I just realized I was torrenting at the time, so maybe I could do a 7th)
2. My PSU is way overkill at 650W. I idle at 55W and max at 75W.
3. 12TB worth of drives in raidZ2 leaves only 7TB available. It's not a lot of space once you really start using it. If I didn't have a bunch of leftover 2TB drives (and funds allowed), I would have gone with 4TB drives. It all depends on your needs though.
4. I'm not using the M.2. I'm using a 128GB Crucial M4. I should probably find another one to mirror the boot drive.

Can you link me to the X11SSM-H board? I can't find it on supermicros site.

 

[rsquared]

If your clients can handle the content being streamed (i.e. no transcoding needed) then bandwidth is your bottleneck, not CPU.

 

[snicke]

Thanks @Raiz.

Can you link me to the X11SSM-H board? I can't find it on supermicros site.

Sure: http://supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/xeon/c236_c232/x11ssm-f.cfm

You just change the h to an m in the end of the url. [emoji4]

Edit: Ah, sorry. I hade a typo in the name of the board. That's why you didn't find it. It should be X11SSM-F not X11SSM-H. My bad. Corrected now above.

Sent from my Galaxy S6 Edge

 

[Bidule0hm]

My PSU is way overkill at 650W. I idle at 55W and max at 75W.

No, because what's matter is the spin-up power and it'll be far over the normal usage power.