Personal FreeNAS Build

[strangelove]

I want to build a personal freeNAS system to savely store my personal media files. I closely followed the hardware recommendation guide to design a system that is easily expandable. Before I will order the components I want to share the configuration here. I am happy to hear your thoughts.

Case:
Fractal Design R5

Mainboard:
Supermicro X11SSM-F-O

CPU:
Intel Xeon E3-1220 v5

Memory:
Kingston DDR4-2133 EEC DIMM 288 16GB (KVR21E15D8/16)

Boot device(s):
2 x Sandisk Ultra Flair 32GB

SSD (for jails - mainly plex, maybe also nextcloud):
Sandisk SSD Plus 120GB

HDD (mirror):
2 x WD Red 4TB (5400 rpm)

PSU:
Corsair RM650x

I want to setup a zpool mirror on the two drives. Mainly to be able to add further vdevs later when needed. But also for performance reasons and in case of failure to minimize the stress during resilvering on the remaining disk (compared to raidz-x).

Also I am not sure about the CPU cooler. I am ordering the boxed version of the CPU which to my knowledge includes a stock cooler. But I am not sure how loud it will be and if it would be better to buy a better CPU cooler (e.g. bequiet Pure/Dark Rock).

Edit: I plan on using version 11 of FreeNAS.

 

[danb35]

2 x Sandisk Ultra Flair 32GB

Consider a small SSD instead. You have plenty of SATA ports, and it'd be much faster and much more reliable.

I want to setup a zpool mirror on the two drives. Mainly to be able to add further vdevs later when needed. But also for performance reasons and in case of failure to minimize the stress during resilvering on the remaining disk (compared to raidz-x).

A mirror is the only sensible configuration for two drives, but you can add further vdevs to RAIDZn pools as well. And I've never seen evidence supporting the "stress" of resilvering as being at all problematic.

 

[Chris Moore]

SSD (for jails - mainly plex, maybe also nextcloud):
Sandisk SSD Plus 120GB

I put my 'jails' dataset as part of my main pool (you can define multiple datasets within the same pool) and my Plex is using about 120GB of storage for the metadata associated with my media library. I don't know about nextcloud, but Plex doesn't need to be on a SSD. You would probably be better served to start with four hard drives, one pool, with two mirror vdevs, instead of spending for a small SSD to use for the jails.
You would get more speed from the disks this way as the data would be striped across more vdevs.

 

[Ericloewe]

And I've never seen evidence supporting the "stress" of resilvering as being at all problematic.

Yeah, it's as bad as a scrub - so perfectly tolerable. Nerve-wrecking if you're down to no parity and mildly annoying when you're down to one drive's worth of parity and a non-event if you're running RAIDZ3 and lost only one drive.

 

[strangelove]

Thanks for the suggestions. I will use the SSD as the boot device and not for jails. Any comments on the CPU cooler? Will the stock cooler be much louder compared to a third-party model like bequiet Pure Rock or bequiet Dark Rock?

EDIT: Just for clarification, I used to believe that FreeNAS is loaded into memory on bootup and yesterday I read somewhere that this is no longer true for newer versions of FreeNAS. Is this true or is it still loaded into memory?

 

[danb35]

I used to believe that FreeNAS is loaded into memory on bootup

That was the case through the 9.2 series, but no longer. ZFS caching means that most of the OS will be in RAM most of the time, but it isn't in a RAMdisk as it used to be.

 

[strangelove]

Thanks again. I think I settled for the above config without an extra CPU cooler and add two more 4TB drives as suggested. Now I have just one last question: How should I stresstest the system before using it? I think testing the CPU and hard drives should be enough? For the CPU I could use a tool like Prime95. Is there a similar tool for testing hard drives? Also how would I actually go about this, would I just use a live usb of a linux distro and use standalone versions of the testing tools? Or how does your standard procedure look like?

 

[danb35]

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...for-freenas-scripts-including-disk-burnin.28/
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/building-burn-in-and-testing-your-freenas-system.38/
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?resources/solnet-array-test.1/
https://www.familybrown.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=fester:hvalid_hdd