Hi
I wondered of someone would be so kind to add some input with their FreeNAS experience and knowledge. I might be able to get my hands on a single HP Lefthand P4300 SAN Node with 8x LFF drive bays, and thinking i might try to run FreeNAS on it.
My current setup.
I have a HP DL 360 G7 server running Windows Server 2016, i use this for a home lab, hyper-V and media server. Internal storage is 2x 256 Intel consumer SSDs, running RAID1 as system drive on the internal Smart Array P410i controller, also 6x 900gb SAS 10K drives in RAID10 for VM storage.
The DAS is a MSA 60 Disk enclosure connected to a Smart Array P411 controller. 4X4 TB SATA disks in Raid5, and 7x2TB SATA disks in RAID 5. I use REFS for these volumes, and is mostly used for media storage.
This setup is NOISY, that MSA 60 disk enclosure is running its fans at full speed always. And frankly i am not happy with performance, sequential file copy from a VM to the DAS can be as low as 40/50 megabytes/sec. At least the DL360 has fan control, and is much quieter. Also I suspect the MSA is using a lot of power. I should get a power meter and check. I think the slow performance is a I/O issue with all these RAID volumes connected to this single server, I am not sure the P410 series controller is handling the RAID5 I/O load very well, and i should have used an P800 series instead.
This is where the HP Lefthand node comes in to play, I want to replace the MSA60 DAS with a lower power and quieter NAS.
The HP Lefthand node is a HP DL185 G5, so it is old, at least 10 years old I think. It has a third gen AMD Opteron, 4 Core CPU, i do not know the exact the model, it should be a 55 or 75W cpu. So the power usage should not be that terrible. It is also and option to install a second CPU as the mainboard support it. It has 2GB RAM, i should be able to get 16GB DDR2 ECC on eBay for cheep, 32GB per CPU is supported It has a LSI SAS 1078 disk controller. And has a SATA controller for the DVD drive so I will replace the DVD drive for a small SSD boot drive.
https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/GetD...kspecs&doclang=EN_US&searchquery=&cc=ie&lc=en
https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c04284263.pdf
https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/c04140658.pdf?ver=18
If I do this I will get cheep 10GB nics from eBay, and do direct connect to the server for VM storage access and I will use the 2x 1GB nics for all other network access. I already have 2x Mellanox X2 cards but I am not sure FreeNAS supports these.
I would ditch the 2 TB drives, and add an extra 4TB drive for a 5x4 TB RAID-Z1 volume. If i need more space later I can replace all the 4TB drives or add 3x higher capacity drives in a new RAID-Z1 volume, to populate the last 3 drive bays.
Option B is going the simple route, buy a Synology DS1817+ and add a 10GB NIC. Then configure 4x4tb and 4x2TB disk inn an Synology proprietary SHR Raid, and use BTRFS. This would give me alot of flexibility regarding disk upgrades. But all the downsides a proprietary RAID system, and possible issues that can couse. The Synology Box ia 1000$ plus, and the Lefthand node is free.
Any thoughts?
Would this be a good setup for FreeNAS, will the hardware be powerfull enough, is the AMD CPU an issue?
I apologize for any grammer and spelling error. Thanks alot in advance for any input.
I wondered of someone would be so kind to add some input with their FreeNAS experience and knowledge. I might be able to get my hands on a single HP Lefthand P4300 SAN Node with 8x LFF drive bays, and thinking i might try to run FreeNAS on it.
My current setup.
I have a HP DL 360 G7 server running Windows Server 2016, i use this for a home lab, hyper-V and media server. Internal storage is 2x 256 Intel consumer SSDs, running RAID1 as system drive on the internal Smart Array P410i controller, also 6x 900gb SAS 10K drives in RAID10 for VM storage.
The DAS is a MSA 60 Disk enclosure connected to a Smart Array P411 controller. 4X4 TB SATA disks in Raid5, and 7x2TB SATA disks in RAID 5. I use REFS for these volumes, and is mostly used for media storage.
This setup is NOISY, that MSA 60 disk enclosure is running its fans at full speed always. And frankly i am not happy with performance, sequential file copy from a VM to the DAS can be as low as 40/50 megabytes/sec. At least the DL360 has fan control, and is much quieter. Also I suspect the MSA is using a lot of power. I should get a power meter and check. I think the slow performance is a I/O issue with all these RAID volumes connected to this single server, I am not sure the P410 series controller is handling the RAID5 I/O load very well, and i should have used an P800 series instead.
This is where the HP Lefthand node comes in to play, I want to replace the MSA60 DAS with a lower power and quieter NAS.
The HP Lefthand node is a HP DL185 G5, so it is old, at least 10 years old I think. It has a third gen AMD Opteron, 4 Core CPU, i do not know the exact the model, it should be a 55 or 75W cpu. So the power usage should not be that terrible. It is also and option to install a second CPU as the mainboard support it. It has 2GB RAM, i should be able to get 16GB DDR2 ECC on eBay for cheep, 32GB per CPU is supported It has a LSI SAS 1078 disk controller. And has a SATA controller for the DVD drive so I will replace the DVD drive for a small SSD boot drive.
https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/GetD...kspecs&doclang=EN_US&searchquery=&cc=ie&lc=en
https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c04284263.pdf
https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/c04140658.pdf?ver=18
If I do this I will get cheep 10GB nics from eBay, and do direct connect to the server for VM storage access and I will use the 2x 1GB nics for all other network access. I already have 2x Mellanox X2 cards but I am not sure FreeNAS supports these.
I would ditch the 2 TB drives, and add an extra 4TB drive for a 5x4 TB RAID-Z1 volume. If i need more space later I can replace all the 4TB drives or add 3x higher capacity drives in a new RAID-Z1 volume, to populate the last 3 drive bays.
Option B is going the simple route, buy a Synology DS1817+ and add a 10GB NIC. Then configure 4x4tb and 4x2TB disk inn an Synology proprietary SHR Raid, and use BTRFS. This would give me alot of flexibility regarding disk upgrades. But all the downsides a proprietary RAID system, and possible issues that can couse. The Synology Box ia 1000$ plus, and the Lefthand node is free.
Any thoughts?
Would this be a good setup for FreeNAS, will the hardware be powerfull enough, is the AMD CPU an issue?
I apologize for any grammer and spelling error. Thanks alot in advance for any input.
