Quick check up before shopping

[eretron]

Hello,

First of all I would like to thank whole community for making it possible to learn a lot...

I have just started building my freenas ZFS server and have 1 question.

Already got myself 6x WD Red 2TB (RAIDZ2) hdds and set them up with non ecc system for testing it out. Everything is OK, and since I learned here that non ECC is BIG no no with ZFS, I've looked for a server board and ecc mem. So is this a good choice ( I can get this for good price ) Intel S5000-SL with Xeon 5410@2.33ghz and 8GB of ECC DDR2.

Also shod I buy NIC or should I use one of the integrated into MB? Are those integrated Intel NICs good as PCI ones?

ThNks in advance.


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[cyberjock]

I'd never buy that hardware... FBDIMMs use like 10w per stick! And the old Xeons that are pre socket-1366 weren't exactly frugal with power savings. FBDIMMs were dead before they were released. It's not an accident that they existed for a single generation and then disappeared. They were terrible. They ran very hot, consumed a huge amount of power, and the benefits really weren't all they were supposed to be.

So no, I'd never buy it. I'd take it if it's free(and I'd never plan to use it in a server long-term.. only a stop-gap emergency). But I'd never consider paying for that hardware.

 

[eretron]

Ok, I'll keep on looking :)

Thanks


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[eretron]

Just one more thing.

Generally are Intel integrated NICs on their server MBs are good enough or should PCI card be used?

So after some time exploring, I narrowed my search to this MB - SuperMicro X10SLM+-F, so my only doubt is that, since this MB supports Celeron, Pentium, i3 and Xeon, generally for 6 drive raidz2 NAS what CPU is required?

NAS would be used by 2 - 3 clients for Video editing.

Thanks a lot

 

[cyberjock]

Integrated Intel is fine. PCI NICs are a recipe for performance complaints because PCI is a parallel bus design, so your NIC will have to share the PCI bus with other devices.

 

[joelmusicman]

For your intended use, the Pentium G3220 would probably be fine. If you want to run encryption, step up to the i3-4130 (adds AES-NI).

 

[eretron]

Thanks for reply,

I see that by default FreeNas adds compression to the ZFS Pools, but I was wondering since 90% of the pool data will be video material (that is already compressed by video codecs) there is no need of using compression at all. Am I getting something wrong here or not? I guess that compression adds up a bit of CPU usage for compressing data.

 

[jgreco]

PCI NICs are a recipe for performance complaints because PCI is a parallel bus design, so your NIC will have to share the PCI bus with other devices.

Right conclusion but wrong reason; there are nice multi-PCI-bus designs like the ServerWorks, which was the heavy lifter for us for a while... see block diagrams:

http://www.sql-server-performance.com/2002/system-architecture/5/

etc

The fundamental problem is that PCI was introduced in the early '90's, back in the days of the 486, when a 32 bit 33 MHz landed you at a potential transfer rate of 133MB/sec, which lasted up through 64-bit 66 MHz (533MB/sec), which is seriously fast enough to push dual GbE. And PCI-X pushed that north to nearly an order of magnitude faster. If you do the math, a gigE port can run about 125MB/sec (we could pretend that's actually 200MB/sec on the bus, times two directions, so 400MB/sec bus bandwidth needed, times four ports, is 1600MB/sec, but with a peak speed of 4.3GB/sec, PCI-X 2.0 would have been fine with that).

The real problem with PCI and PCI-X isn't the fundamental technology, it's that it tends to be old, and just because something is theoretically capable of something does not make it capable in practice. A lot of older gigabit chips are piggy wattburners (I've got some nice Tigon II's - dual R4000 CPU's onboard!) and most of the cheaper ones aren't real great. You can put the Intel server PCI-X cards in a well designed board and you probably would not be able to notice a difference.

And the technical challenges of the wide data path, when compared to the relative ease of PCI-Express, doomed PCI-X.