PassMark: AMD Ryzen 7 1700 for 300USD?

[Neosphere]

Hi there,

in almost every thread here I read about Intel's XEON CPUs and AsRock mother boards.
Would AMD Ryzen 7 1700 for 300USD with a MSI B350M MORTAR (mATX form factor) mother board for about 100USD be OK as well?
The CPU seems to be pretty good, according to https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html and the board supports 64GB ECC RAM.

Well if someone decides to go for ATX, would even ASUS PRIME B350-PLUS be OK as mother board?

 

[danb35]

in almost every thread here I read about Intel's XEON CPUs and AsRock mother boards.

I'd expect you're seeing much more about Supermicro than Asrock, and there are plenty of folks with non-Xeon CPUs. But there doesn't seem to be much, if any, Ryzen experience at this point.

 

[Chris Moore]

Hi there,

in almost every thread here I read about Intel's XEON CPUs and AsRock mother boards.
Would AMD Ryzen 7 1700 for 300USD with a MSI B350M MORTAR (mATX form factor) mother board for about 100USD be OK as well?
The CPU seems to be pretty good, according to https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html and the board supports 64GB ECC RAM.

Well if someone decides to go for ATX, would even ASUS PRIME B350-PLUS be OK as mother board?

I saw a couple posts recently about atempting to use the new AMD processor and both of them kind of fizzled out after talking about the problems they were having trying to get things working.

It is too new to be able to be fully supported. If you want to have something that is supported right now and there is experience in configuring it, you need to go with Intel.

If you want AMD, just because, that is fine but you should wait six to nine months to give the developers time to create the modifications to make it compatible.

 

[Neosphere]

OK, so which would be examples of "good" CPUs are able to transcode 4 Plex Media HD streams?
Would Intel C2550 (Avoton) be able to manage that? It is embedded inside the AsRock board I was looking at.

 

[Chris Moore]

OK, so which would be examples of "good" CPUs are able to transcode 4 Plex Media HD streams?
Would Intel C2550 (Avoton) be able to manage that? It is embedded inside the AsRock board I was looking at.

That is like asking a compact car to haul as much freight as a freight truck. I shouldn't need to say NO to that, you can find the answer to that with a quick Google search, like I just did. You need a 2000 PassMark score PER 1080p stream or 1500 PassMark PER 720p stream.
That CPU only has a 2329 PassMark score TOTAL. That might allow it to stream ONE transcoded stream and handle the overhead of FreeNAS.
At the minimum, to transcode 4 streams at once as you asked, I would think you need Intel Xeon E3-1230 v3 @ 3.30GHz. That is an LGA 1150 CPU that you might be able to pick second hand at a significant savings over buying new.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/QTY-1x-Intel-CPU-E3-1230-V3-Quad-Core-3-3Ghz-LGA1150-SR153-/142433761930
You can use that CPU with a system board like this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/SueprMicro-X10SLL-F-LGA1150-Server-Motherboard-/222627716191
But you will need a heatsink because one is not included with the other two parts.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-...Socket-LGA1150-1155-SNK-P0046A4-/232452367545
Then you need memory:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/32GB-4X8GB-...0SLL-F-X10SLH-F-Motherboard-B90-/272412460475

 

[Chris Moore]

How much storage do you need?

 

[Neosphere]

How much storage do you need?

I need about 4TB for personal files (photos, videos, documents) and about the same for Plex.
I wanted to go with 2x RAID 1 with 2x 4TB Seagate IronWolfs each. 32GB RAM should be more than enough.

 

[Chris Moore]

If you are going to have 4 x 4TB drives, your best configuration will be all four drives in a RAID-Z2 pool. This gives you effectively the same amount of storage as two mirrors but better redundancy as you can loose a single drive and still maintain redundancy. Personally, I would go with a minimum of six drives. The ones I have been suggesting are based on my personal experience. I don't believe there is a need to spend the extra money on NAS specific drives and I have been using Seagate Desktop drives for more than five years with great results.
This is the model I am buying for my NAS. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178338
I have already bought 7 and am planning to buy 5 more. I have six of them installed and they work great.

 

[Neosphere]

Is RAID-Z2 the same as RAID6 (see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#/media/File:RAID_6.svg)?
Mhm... every mass production NAS manufacturer like QNAP or Synology recommends NAS specific disks.
Strangely, in Switzerland, those Desktop HDs are not cheaper than NAS HDs.

 

[Chris Moore]

ZFS, the file system of FreeNAS, uses different terminology to avoid confusion because this is not traditional hardware RAID and does not work exactly the same way. It RAID-z2 is similar to RAID-6 in that there are two drives worth of parity data.
If you want to go with NAS hard drives, do so. FreeNAS is different from other NAS systems in that it is NOT hardware RAID. ZFS is designed to handle disk deficiencies that would fail a drive right out of a hardware RAID set. It is ZFS that makes it possible to mix models and manufacturers and sizes in the same zpool and it just works because ZFS is so good. Because ZFS is so good, the drives don't have to be as good. If you want to buy the best data center grade drives you can find, go right ahead, it won't hurt a thing except the cost will be more.

 

[Chris Moore]

The original quote is no longer available at the source, but here is the quote: "With RAID-Z, ZFS provides fast, reliable storage using cheap, commodity disks." This can be seen now at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

It was originally able to be seen at: Jeff Bonwick's Blog (2005-11-17) in a post called "RAID-Z".
Unfortunately, that link does not work any more because, Oracle. It was still available as recently as 2015-02-01.

Jeff Bonwick invented and led development of the ZFS file system, which was used in Oracle Corporation's ZFS storage products as well as startups including Nexenta, Delphix, Joyent, and Datto, Inc.

 

[MrToddsFriends]

Because ZFS is so good, the drives don't have to be as good.

To my knowledge, TLER (or whatever it is called by disk manufacturers) should be supported by the disks and head parking should not be set to aggressive values.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/checking-for-tler-erc-etc-support-on-a-drive.27126/
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hacking-wd-greens-and-reds-with-wdidle3-exe.18171/

Using WD Red exclusively, I don't have an overview which desktop drives are ruled out by these two requirements (if any) and which models require special treatment during installation and/or boot.

 

[Chris Moore]

To my knowledge, TLER (or whatever it is called by disk manufacturers) should be supported by the disks and head parking should not be set to aggressive values.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/checking-for-tler-erc-etc-support-on-a-drive.27126/
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hacking-wd-greens-and-reds-with-wdidle3-exe.18171/

Using WD Red exclusively, I don't have an overview which desktop drives are ruled out by these two requirements (if any) and which models require special treatment during installation and/or boot.

Before you post about something, you should do your research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control
ZFS is specifically mentioned
This is primarily only a problem with hardware RAID or systems that are not ZFS

 

[MrToddsFriends]

Before you post about something, you should do your research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control
ZFS is specifically mentioned
This is primarily only a problem with hardware RAID or systems that are not ZFS

In the first posting I linked, jgreco comes to the conclusion that "TLER/ERC/etc are also desirable properties for a ZFS system" in the section "But what about ZFS?" of his posting. The Wikipedia article you linked states that "this will usually force an immediate sector remap on a weak sector in most drives". Hmmm, "usually" ..."most drives" exactly tells me what?

 

[MrToddsFriends]

Also a good read:
http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Hardware#Error_recovery_control

 

[Chris Moore]

you linked states that "this will usually force an immediate sector remap on a weak sector in most drives". Hmmm, "usually" ..."most drives" exactly tells me what?

Non definitive statements are required due to the fact that not all drive manufacturers make their drives the same way. Different results with different hardware because of the firmware and the fact that the hardware is physically different to some degree.
You can't get the exact same behavior from an Audi as a BMW, different hardware, but generally speaking, you can drive either of them to work.

The point being that ZFS will not wait. If it can't read the data in one place, it will go to the parity data and recompute the data that should have been there, then try to write that data to the non responding block. If the block is bad, the disk should mark it bad and reallocate the block. I have had this work perfectly in my systems using desktop grade drives many times over the years. I have actually replaced every drive in the older of the two NAS systems I am running now. About half of the replacements were due to bad sectors cropping up. I replaced the other 7 drives in that system as a preventive maintenance because they were over five years old. I have been using Seagate Desktop drives for more than 5 years and a I have experience with bad sectors but any drive can have bad sectors and I have never had a single drive drop out of the array.

I am not justifying my position with the guesses of some other person. I am telling you what my observations have been. Seagate Desktop drives are less expensive in most markets and work just as well as the more expensive drives. In many cases, you can afford to buy a cold spare with the money you save on Seagate drives and Western Digital are not better drives. I have racks full of them at work and they fail just as often as the Seagate drives. I had a system just last month where one of the WD Red Pro drives cooked off (over 130c) and killed the two drives next to it. I never had that sort of failure with a Seagate and the WD drives (at the same RPM) always run hotter.

Then there is the source you cite. It says, "error recovery control has been removed from low-end drives from certain manufacturers, most notably Western Digital." So, the problem that you have is with WD drives. Learn something here, WD is trying to force you to buy more expensive drives by removing features from the less expensive drives. It is all about their profit margin.

 

[MrToddsFriends]

Then there is the source you cite. It says, "error recovery control has been removed from low-end drives from certain manufacturers, most notably Western Digital."

I'm not trying to be smarter than the authors of the OpenZFS Wiki, which make a further statement in the very next sentence: "Consistent performance requires hard drives that support error recovery control." This statement is not specific to WD drives.

So, the problem that you have is with WD drives.

When comparing the data sheets of Seagate BarraCuda (desktop) and IronWolf (NAS) drives a certain difference is eye-catching: No mentioning of Error Recovery Control in the former while all IronWolf HDDs do support this feature. So no, this problem is not specific to WD drives.

Learn something here, WD is trying to force you to buy more expensive drives by removing features from the less expensive drives. It is all about their profit margin.

A popular German (sorry for that) price comparison website tells me that prices for the BarraCuda Compute 4TB (ST4000DM004) are starting at € 104.85 while those for the IronWolf NAS HDD 4TB (ST4000VN008) are starting at € 110.20 as of now. That's a saving of € 1.34 per Terabyte raw capacity for giving up TLER/ERC support as recommended by the OpenZFS Wiki. Or roughly 20 HDDs to make up a spare from the difference. Guess which ones I would buy as a home user.

 

[Chris Moore]

You are probably looking at the wrong data sheets, but even if you look at the right ones, that doesn't matter because the data sheets don't tell the whole story. I put them to the test and have run these drives in my own system 24x7 for over 5 years.

Seagate Desktop HDD ST4000DM000 4TB 64MB Cache - $111.99

Seagate BarraCuda ST4000DM005 4TB 64MB Cache - $114.00

Seagate IronWolf 4TB NAS Hard Drive 5900 RPM 64MB Cache - $139.99

Seagate BarraCuda Pro ST4000DM006 4TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache - $179.99

Seagate IronWolf Pro ST4000NE0025 4TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache - $192.76

You don't need to tell me the prices. I already know and I have done the in person side by side testing myself.
You do what ever you want. I don't care. I know what I will do and what I will continue to suggest to other people.
When I say Seagate Desktop, I am taking about the cheapest one, not the Barracuda and I have been running the 2TB model in my NAS for long enough I know how they will behave. It isn't a question.

 

[Inxsible]

@OP, Hmmm... I am now wondering what your game is:

• In this thread you are trying to build a $2500 system based on a Supermicro board
• In this 2nd thread you are trying to build a $1450 system based on AsRock Avoton board
• In the same 2nd thread post #4, you are thinking about the ML10 based system for $1200
• In the same 2nd thread post #9, you are trying to build a $1900 system based on a different Supermicro board
• In this thread, you are building a Ryzen based system for $400

Looks like you are all over the place on your requirements and your budget.

OR ... you are just trolling us !!!

 

[Neosphere]

Not trolling, just asking questions about builds that could work, because I need a NAS box for my family. However input from various users of this forum was helpful and confusing at the same time.

My requirements are basically:
- I want to spend as little as possible
- the NAS box has to transcode 4 Plex streams at the same time
- it must be as small and silent as possible (living room box)

It's difficult for me, as first time FreeNAS user :/