PassMark: AMD Ryzen 7 1700 for 300USD?

[Chris Moore]

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 :/

I don't think that you can get a system that will perform at the level you seek, 4 simultaneous streams, and be quiet enough to keep in the living room.
The Plex is accessed by the network, so there is no reason to have it in the same room with the TV.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[Ericloewe]

It's possible, but it's not a very good idea. A high-end Xeon E3 can probably do four transcodes and a huge-ass Noctua heatsink can keep it cool without too much noise.

The constraint is always hard drive cooling. Given that space is generally not abundant in a living room, a compact unit is required, which mandates a certain density of hard drives. That's when cooling gets louder.

 

[Stux]

Yeah, my home system should do it. It's not a budget build though, tends to happen when you use an 8 core Xeon d board with 10gig networking.

Stepping down to quad core Xeon d, might not get you 4 transcodes.

(You could step up to 12 or 16 core Xeon d too, but they're made of unobtanium)

Stepping sideways, Could use one of those mini ITX lga1151 boards, but they only have 2 dimm slots :( (and no possibility of on board 10 gig networking)

There is plenty of room in the node 304 for a huge Noctua Heatsink. It's designed to meet a LAN gamer's gpu/CPU requirements

The node304s thermal design is very clever, Noctuize all the fans and it's pretty quiet. If my drawing skillz weren't non existsant, I'd make a post about it.

I tossed up between a UNAS810A with a mATX board and the node 304 for a while.

 

[Z300M]

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.

I'm using all Seagate Desktop drives too; see my sig. The first of my original ST32000641AS drives (5-year warranty) died totally after about a year and was replaced by an ST2000DM001 that outlasted the remainder of the 5-year warranty. The second ST32000641AS failed about a month ago (beyond the warranty period).

However, I think that the current Barracuda drives, such as the ST4000DM005, are the replacements for the "Desktop" drives, and that the latter are being discontinued.

 

[wackymole]

Ryzen 1700 works fine with FreeNAS, but there are some bugs especially if you want it to be a hypervisor as well. I am not to the point where I can say it is stable and production ready, but so far I have not encounter any problems with the basic storage aspect of a ryzen FreeNAS.

You should have no problem with a Ryzen build in a home environment. I have already loaded PLEX on mine with no difficultly.

 

[Chris Moore]

Ryzen 1700 works fine with FreeNAS, but there are some bugs especially if you want it to be a hypervisor as well. I am not to the point where I can say it is stable and production ready, but so far I have not encounter any problems with the basic storage aspect of a ryzen FreeNAS.

You should have no problem with a Ryzen build in a home environment. I have already loaded PLEX on mine with no difficultly.

Did you do any stress test wit Plex to see how many streams it can handle? The OP wanted to have 4.

 

[wackymole]

Did you do any stress test wit Plex to see how many streams it can handle? The OP wanted to have 4.

I have not, but I will put it on the list. - Still messing with the VM's so it might be a while until I reply back.

 

[wackymole]

The plex plugin can run two 2k streams at once through the browser. The 3rd crashes it. I don't think it has anything to do with the cpu though, the usage is quite low. Cheers

 

[wackymole]

I just pulled 5 1080p streams at once. No problem. 6 and I got slow down and stopping on some.. No crash though!

 

[Inxsible]

That's not bad at all, 2x 2k stream or 5x1080p streams.

Thanks for being the guinea pig for FreeNAS on Ryzen.

 

[diedrichg]

I just pulled 5 1080p streams at once. No problem. 6 and I got slow down and stopping on some.. No crash though!

That's interesting news given a Passmark of 13,793 for the 1700 stock frequency, that's right up there with the E5-2630v4. I bet there was room for the last stream but the limiting factor was the LAN. I'm also happy to hear that you've had a stable experience with Ryzen/FreeNAS!

 

[wackymole]

I bet there was room for the last stream but the limiting factor was the LAN.

Yeah... I did pull it over wifi. 5 Ghz but I did not think about it.

 

[chopperpl]

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.

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.

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.

Hello everyone!
This post is kind of old, but in case anyone was looking for some advise regarding NAS vs Desktop drives (especially those from Seageate) for their ZFS project, then here is the very interesting comment from the official Seagate pre-sale rep regarding IronWolf series. The most interesting part is about the JBOD setup, which we all use for ZFS.
"ST4000VN008 (IronWolf) - short answer: If you're using as a single drive, we don't recommend it for your use case. If you're going to be RAID-ing multiple of them together, then yes.
NAS drives like the IronWolf typically have firmware engineered for NAS use, usually in RAID. Our firmware for the IronWolf is called AgileArray and one of the things it does is that it has controls so that when a drive in the array encounters errors, it gives it a certain short amount of time to deal with it before giving it the hook and passing it to another drive in the array so it doesn't get bogged down. Great for keeping snappy performance on the RAID array, but creates a problem when used as a single drive or JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks): It can cause errors to pile up on the drive quicker than is ideal."

...so, do we really want to use RED drives for ZFS????

CHEERS!!!! ;)

 

[danb35]

the JBOD setup, which we all use for ZFS

No, very, very few of us use ZFS in anything like a JBOD setup; almost all of us use some form of RAID arrangement. The statement from the Seagate rep says that they're doing TLER in their NAS drives, which I would have expected.

 

[Chris Moore]

then here is the very interesting comment from the official Seagate pre-sale rep regarding IronWolf series. The most interesting part is about the JBOD setup, which we all use for ZFS.

@danb35 already commented on this, but I wanted to try and explain to you what you are misunderstanding. The drives in a ZFS pool are presented as a JBOD to the operating system, meaning that there is no hardware RAID controller interfering with the operating system being able to see each and every drive and access all of it's features. In some other operating system, these disks would be individual disks and that is what the Seagate rep is suggesting is a bad idea. In FreeNAS, ZFS (the file system) has the integrated capability to take those individual disks and create a storage pool. It is the ZFS software that allows the more intelligent handling of disks than what is possible with typical hardware RAID controllers and this is the reason we use ZFS. The Seagate rep is simply unaware of how ZFS works. Their explanation is geared toward those that are only familiar with using a single drive or using hardware RAID to make many drives appear to be a single drive. The vast majority of sales people I speak to have no idea what ZFS is or how it interacts with any hardware in a system.

 

[chopperpl]

No, very, very few of us use ZFS in anything like a JBOD setup; almost all of us use some form of RAID arrangement. The statement from the Seagate rep says that they're doing TLER in their NAS drives, which I would have expected.

By saying JBOD I meant representing individual disks to ZFS, and let it manage them with the raidz layout of your choice... I thought ERC benefits only hardware based RAID controllers. I guess I've been out of the field for too long ;)

 

[Chris Moore]

By saying JBOD I meant representing individual disks to ZFS, and let it manage them with the raidz layout of your choice... I thought ERC benefits only hardware based RAID controllers. I guess I've been out of the field for too long ;)

It is my understanding that ZFS would work with commodity (desktop grade) drives and I have been using that type drive in my system since around 2012 or 13 with no significant difficulties. There is some debate on the issue, as you can see from the thread. I use Seagate Desktop and Seagate Barracuda drives in my NAS. Last year I replaced 12 drives that had gone over five years of service and I know my results are statistically insignificant, but I do base my opinions on observations in addition to what I have read. My understanding is that if a drive is delayed by repeatedly trying to read a sector, it might slow the responsiveness of the pool. The pool will still function and ZFS will deal with it without marking the drive bad, but it will make the pool slower. In a hardware RAID card, a drive that takes too long to respond would be summarily dumped as being defective. They just don't deal and that is what makes ERC (TLER) a mandatory feature with hardware RAID. In ZFS it might be nice to have, but isn't mandatory.

 

[chopperpl]

They just don't deal and that is what makes ERC (TLER) a mandatory feature with hardware RAID. In ZFS it might be nice to have, but isn't mandatory.

Just wondering if you have tried enabling ERC manually on any desktop seagate drive...

 

[Chris Moore]

Just wondering if you have tried enabling ERC manually on any desktop seagate drive...

If you look at this link:

Github repository for FreeNAS scripts, including disk burnin
https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...for-freenas-scripts-including-disk-burnin.28/

I have run the script named set_hdd_erc.sh against the drives in my pool, but I don't know if it actually has an effect.