People who know just enough to be dangerous part CLXXVI

[Ericloewe]

Here I was happily (and sleepily) browsing the interwebs when this thing pops up on my figurative radar.

Holy fscking bit bucket in the sky.

The "article" includes such gems as:

So why are we planning to use RAID 5 here? Well RAID 5 uses block level to strip data across the drives with parity; the data will be evenly distributed among the drives. So the recovery in case of the failure would be relatively fast/easy. Drives do go bad no matter that kind you use, however, high-end Hard Drives provide longer mean time before failures.

we are going to be using i7 3960x CPU with GA-x79-UD3 LGA 2011 Motherboard.

No ECC...

Ram is equally important as it can effect the stability of the motherboard, that is why we are going to use Kingston HyperX Beast.

Kingston and stability in the same sentence. Brilliant. /s

To power our [9 HDD] system we will use a Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold power supply, which offers 1200 Watts of max power.

"We predict that each drive will require approximately 100W when loaded."

This is a particularly hilarious one:

Icy Dock DataCage has 6 SATA type connectors. If you are planning to daisy chaining drives, then this enclosure is for you.

I think he means the second SAS port...

Cooling in this type of set up is very important. What I wanted to do here is provide CPU with its own dedicated cooling, this is why I went with water cooling solution by Cooler Master, the Seidon 120M.

My favorite (emphasis mine):

One of the most important components in our build is LSI MegaRAID SAS 9271-8i. The card itself is relatively small and offers a battery upgrade function if you need to keep your configurations saved if a power failure occurs.

I am going to be using Windows 7 Ultimate with our setup, however, you are not limited to Windows OS here. There are multiple NAS solutions available, FreeNAS (freenas.org) and Caringo (caringo.com) are my two favorite operating systems for storage optimization.

I hope anyone foolish/ignorant enough to follow this "guide" ends up here and decides to ask questions... and then goes back and kicks the author's behind very violently.

If you want to achieve best performance for your buck, look into hardware RAID controller cards as they would provide you best sequential speeds over software RAID cards.

Or, if you value your money, save the goddamned 700 bucks, use 150 to buy an M1015 and 650 to get a Xeon E5 system with 64GB of RAM and 10GbE.

Earlier in the article I expressed that this storage array will be able to support small to mid size company for about 5 years.

This, kids, is why the "author" is writing shitty "guides" for a living on the internet instead of competing for jgreco's paycheck.

This is one of the reasons why I picked Gigabyte motherboard. They are famous for providing “rock solid” motherboards for gamers and computer enthusiasts along with fairly priced boards.

*sigh*

Kingston offers many types of ram and most of them are affordable, so picking the right ram should be easy.

"We buy whatever falls off the back of a truck in Shenzhen and stick it in our enterprise DIMMs"-reliable!

Cooler Master also makes great and stable power supplies.

If we leave the nitpick that they don't build PSUs aside, they really have a rather mixed to nasty track record on their low-end units.

Investment or an expense? Definitely an Investment. If you look from price point perspective, our complete build is just about $6700 USD (as of March 2013, the original publishing date of this article).

This is the kicker.
Let this sink in with the help of some back-of-the-envelope math:
Xeon E3 - 300 bucks
X10SL7-F - 300 bucks
32GB ECC RAM - 400 bucks
Supermicro 4U Chassis with PSU and SAS expander - 1000 bucks
20 3TB WD Reds - 3000 bucks
Two SSDs for the OS, just because: 200 bucks

So, for 5200 bucks, we can build a much better server! That leaves 1500 bucks to get a managed switch with a few 10GbE ports and a few 10GbE NICs! Or a nice gaming rig! Or more storage! Or Xeon E5 and more RAM!

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah.. but let's face the reality of life. The uninformed tend to not always make the best decisions anyway. It's virtually impossible to always make the best decisions so it's really important that you make enough "good" decisions to make it count. ;)

 

[jgreco]

Kingston and stability in the same sentence. Brilliant.

In all fairness, we've used Kingston here for many years with great luck, and until the Elpida/X10 debacle I would have recommended it without a second thought. However, we're used to dealing with occasional trouble and incompatibilities around here, so when I've suggested memory to people in these forums, it is usually in the form of advising that people use a memory selector tool by either the memory or motherboard manufacturer.

 

[Ericloewe]

Yeah, so did I, on my own tiny three computer scale.
It's sad to see such a reputable company turn into such a poorly-viewed one, but the SSD300 story really crushed my hopes that the Elpida/X10 debacle was an isolated incident that we could make fun of later, like we do with the FDIV bug.

 

[sfcredfox]

Eric, thanks for the post/rant outlining someone else's craziness. I learn best from mistakes, but I like learning from other people's mistakes more...

 

[Z300M]

In all fairness, we've used Kingston here for many years with great luck, and until the Elpida/X10 debacle I would have recommended it without a second thought. However, we're used to dealing with occasional trouble and incompatibilities around here, so when I've suggested memory to people in these forums, it is usually in the form of advising that people use a memory selector tool by either the memory or motherboard manufacturer.

Well, of course the Elpida-chip modules were recommended by the memory manufacturer's (Kingston's) selector tool -- until they weren't, and were not long after discontinued altogether.

Kingston's memory-selector tool now recommends Hynix-chip modules for the X10SL7-F (I didn't check any other SM motherboards), but I would be very wary of those. I can't remember for sure, but I think my Hynix-all-the-way modules were only about the same price as Kingston wants for their new ones.

 

[jgreco]

the SSD300 story

Got a link? Not aware of this, though I'm aware of a bunch of more general problems with SSD failures (not necessarily limited to any one manufacturer).

I think the industry has realized that there are tough times ahead as we continue to miniaturize and integrate, and this has translated to some desperation to find new ways to be successful. For many of the memory manufacturers this seems to include branching out into SSD's etc. But fundamentally customers are shifting away from the PC, at least somewhat, and that's gotta hurt.

 

[jgreco]

Well, of course the Elpida-chip modules were recommended by the memory manufacturer's (Kingston's) selector tool -- until they weren't, and were not long after discontinued altogether.

Yes, I know. My point was perhaps vague. A lot of people go shopping based on specs ("I'll just grab me some DDR3 1600") and that ought to work but it is better to actually get stuff that is explicitly expected to work. Kingston's failure to actually test before listing is kinda unfortunate.

 

[DKarnov]

Got a link? Not aware of this, though I'm aware of a bunch of more general problems with SSD failures (not necessarily limited to any one manufacturer).

I think the industry has realized that there are tough times ahead as we continue to miniaturize and integrate, and this has translated to some desperation to find new ways to be successful. For many of the memory manufacturers this seems to include branching out into SSD's etc. But fundamentally customers are shifting away from the PC, at least somewhat, and that's gotta hurt.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ssdnow-v300-a-switch-to-slower-micron-nand

DRAM makers getting into flash, and getting directly into SSDs, is all an effect of the fantastically capital-intensive reality of deep-submicron semiconductor fabrication. Building NAND (and being able to be your own customer for it) ensures your production lines stay busy with at least somewhat profitable product. Otherwise you risk going the way of Qimonda etc. This also gets into why there's really only three DRAM manufacturers left (and not many more on the NAND side) but that's beyond the scope.

Kingston isn't really a memory manufacturer. They take someone else's chips and stick them on a stick. Which is the root of the problem.

Getting back to the subject, though, the fact that the recommended DRAM brand is Kingston is the least of that server's problems. Even for the memory, it's cheap 'gamer' / desktop box RAM, completely unsuited for purpose.

 

[jgreco]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7763/an-update-to-kingston-ssdnow-v300-a-switch-to-slower-micron-nand

DRAM makers getting into flash, and getting directly into SSDs, is all an effect of the fantastically capital-intensive reality of deep-submicron semiconductor fabrication.

Which'd impress me a tiny bit if Kingston was in that business. But they aren't.

Building NAND (and being able to be your own customer for it) ensures your production lines stay busy with at least somewhat profitable product. Otherwise you risk going the way of Qimonda etc. This also gets into why there's really only three DRAM manufacturers left (and not many more on the NAND side) but that's beyond the scope.

Kingston isn't really a memory manufacturer. They take someone else's chips and stick them on a stick. Which is the root of the problem.

Sticking someone else's chips on your board isn't necessarily a problem, and Kingston's basically been doing that forever. We don't really criticize IBM, Dell, or Supermicro for slapping their labels onto other stuff like LSI RAID controllers or Intel ethernet cards. I'd say the problem here was that Kingston got lazy and didn't actually bother testing sufficiently, because the problem seems to scream out at you if you load up a board with the stuff.

Getting back to the subject, though, the fact that the recommended DRAM brand is Kingston is the least of that server's problems. Even for the memory, it's cheap 'gamer' / desktop box RAM, completely unsuited for purpose.

Well, right. I just felt it was unfair to pile on Kingston for existing, because overall they've been a reasonable memory supplier for almost all of the 15-20 years that we've been buying memory from them.

 

[HolyK]

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I guess the author saw this post and figured out that he is a complete <whatever> ^^

 

[Ericloewe]

I guess the author saw this post and figured out that he is a complete <whatever> ^^

Oh, the nasty comments on the article proper would've been enough to convince any sane editor to pull the "article". And I wasn't the first one to complain, I was just the first one to accuse the author of being irresponsible.
Amazing it got published in the first place.

Now, let's see if I can get the Technical Monkey (a German site titled Technikaffe) to stop spreading their god-awful FreeNAS guide, with such recommendations as a non-server Atom with 4GB of RAM.

 

[cyberjock]

So the author screwed up. But, you gotta give them credit for pulling the article. Not many are willing to admit to their mistakes...

 

[Ericloewe]

So the author screwed up. But, you gotta give them credit for pulling the article. Not many are willing to admit to their mistakes...

Definitely. I have to say I was surprised - even many big names would stick to a nasty article until the legal department calls. It's refreshing to see someone actually reflecting on what they've done.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Once on the internet always on the internet: http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...less/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=ubuntu

 

[cyberjock]

Once on the internet always on the internet: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:HMBDjra-9O4J:www.modders-inc.com/build-storage-server-less/ &cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=ubuntu

Wow. He did get slaughtered in the comments.

 

[Ericloewe]

Wow. He did get slaughtered in the comments.

Story was up on HardOCP - their forum is big on ECC for servers, so I imagine that had something to do with it.

 

[HolyK]

No comments in the webcache version :(

 

[Ericloewe]

Sure the are, just scroll down.

 

[Roman]

Thanks @Ericloewe . Enough humour for saving the evening.

“I am going to be using Windows 7 Ultimate”
Sure, so you have the chess software on your server!

“This is one of the reasons why I picked Gigabyte motherboard. They are famous for providing “rock solid” motherboards for gamers and computer enthusiasts along with fairly priced boards.”
They are famous for providing rock solid marketing.

In all fairness, we've used Kingston here for many years with great luck, and until the Elpida/X10 debacle I would have recommended it without a second thought.

Yes. I ran my X9SAE successfully with 32 GBs of Kingstons ECC U-DIMMs (dated back to 2012). They were also very popular among HP MicroServer users.

But you have to purchase the Ultimate version of Windows 7 separately, though. ;)