Please allow me to introduce myself....and my planned build

[therealmo]

Hey Guys,
My name is Andy. I work in Systems\Network Administration and am currently studying Cyber Security. I live in Sydney, Australia
I have used\owned\tried Synology and QNAP NAS solutions, and am just about to take the plunge into a FreeNAS build.

My build is looking like:
Case: Fractal Design r5
Mobo: Supermicro X11SSM-F
Ram: Crucial 16GB (1x16GB) DDR4 2133MHz ECC Unbuffered UDIMM CL15
CPU: XEON E3-1220V6
Power Supply: Seasonic G-550 Gold 550W
Drives: 4x3TB WD RED - 3x4TB WD Black (I am currently planning 2 x Vdevs, both Raidz2)

I welcome any and all opinions, pointers and hot tips on the above plan.
The build is to facilitate a media (Kodi\Plex) solution with multiple simultaneous transcodes, including a DVR record.
Run a few Dockers\VM's\Jails. (Pihole,Crashplan, Sickrage, Transmission, Coachpotato, OpenVPN etc)
As well as build and configure multi virtual machine labs for work\study
And lastly to look after my wifes photography hobby, with a reliable network storage solution.

So far everything I have learnt on FreeNAS is from this forum, and I look forward to joining the community and maybe one day paying it back.
Hope to chat to you all in the future.
Thanks,
Andy

 

[SweetAndLow]

Build looks good but I would suggest using the same drives and same vdev size/layout if possible. If you plan on using docker or vm's I would 4x your memory. Vm's reserve memory away from the system.

 

[Nick2253]

Welcome Andy! Let's get this thread over to the "Will it FreeNAS?" forum to get you better advice on your build. Paging @Ericloewe!

The first thing that jumps out at me is your HDD choices. Do you already have the drives, or are you planning on buying them? For starters, you can't put 3 drives in a single RAIDZ2 vdev. You need at least 4 drives for RAIDZ2, so if you're planning to put 3x 4TB drives in a single vdev, you'll need to rethink what you're doing. Also, I would steer you away from the WD black drives. You won't really benefit from their extra RPM speed, but you will suffer from the increased vibration and heat that the higher speed drives will generate.

The second thing that jumps out at me is your extensive VM/Docker/Jail use. To support this use, you're going to need to dramatically increase your memory. 16GB is undersized for your storage needs, much less all the rest. I agree with @SweetAndLow: 64GB would be much more appropriate. Also, you'll want to look at your HDD config. RAIDZ2 is very slow for VMs. I would suggest you look into doing stripped mirrors (aka RAID10). This will help your performance quite a bit. And you'd be looking at approximately the same amount of storage as your two vdevs.

 

[Chris Moore]

The build is to facilitate a media (Kodi\Plex) solution with multiple simultaneous transcodes, including a DVR record.
Run a few Dockers\VM's\Jails. (Pihole,Crashplan, Sickrage, Transmission, Coachpotato, OpenVPN etc)
As well as build and configure multi virtual machine labs for work\study
And lastly to look after my wifes photography hobby, with a reliable network storage solution.

That is not a few VMs. Memory is the big problem I see, like @Nick2253 pointed out. To ensure that you have enough resources for all that virtualization, you should go with a system like this because it can carry so much more memory:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro...-2-6ghz-8-Core-128gb-24-Bay-JBOD/292399861990

 

[Chris Moore]

I welcome any and all opinions, pointers and hot tips on the above plan.

There have been a couple people in Australia that posted about buying their hardware in the US and paying to have it shipped to Australia because it they were able to get the hardware they needed that way where they just couldn't find what they wanted in Australia.
Here is a link to one: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/lets-talk-rackmount.58012/#post-410666
You might try asking him for his experiences.

 

[therealmo]

thanks for all the input guys.
The hard drives are what I already have. They are currently in a QNAP and just sitting around.
I prefer to re use them rather than purchase more drives, so I am kind of channeled into my dual vdev decision.
Apologies I meant to say Raidz1 for both, based on the 3 drive vdev limitation. (my critical data will be backed up, like a good little sysadmin)
I read it is not perfect, but should not cause any issues
Thanks for the idea on raid 10, will definitely look further in to this

Totally agree on the ram situation
I purchased only one stick (1x16) while I build\configure and get my key services up.
I will be picking up the other 3 sticks over the next couple of pay days.

Thanks again guys

 

[Nick2253]

The hard drives are what I already have....Apologies I meant to say Raidz1 for both, based on the 3 drive vdev limitation.

First off, if they're used hard drives, you want to make sure you do a proper testing routine on them. No sense in getting everything set up with bad drives.

Second, you're still going to have potential performance issues with this setup. If you were only doing one or two extra things, you'd be fine. With your laundry list of additional services, you will benefit significantly from stripped mirrors.

If you just cannot accept the utilization ratio for stripped mirrors, then you might as well set up your drives in one RAIDZ2 vdev. 7 would be an uncommon size for a vdev, but it's not really an issue. Doing it this way would "cost" you 2TB (every drive is treated the same as the smallest drive, so you'll get 6TB from your 3x 4TB drives instead of 8TB), but that's a very small price to pay for significantly increased reliability.

 

[Chris Moore]

thanks for all the input guys.

Totally agree on the ram situation
I purchased only one stick (1x16) while I build\configure and get my key services up.
I will be picking up the other 3 sticks over the next couple of pay days.

Thanks again guys

So you didn't really come asking a question?

 

[BigDave]

So you didn't really come asking a question?

He said that he would welcome any opinions, pointers and hot tips.
He never promised to follow your advice :p