Raid

[Robert Hart]

Hi All,

I'm new to FreeNAS and building nas drive's. I understand Raids and currently have a synology Nas in Raid 10. I'm building a nas a need to know if I should be using hardware raid or software raid and if i should be using raid 10 or a zfs alternative. My hardware will consist of the following

Supermicro SuperChassis 826BE1C-R920LPB
Supermicro X10SRH-CLN4F
Intel Xeon E5-2620 V3
8 x 4tb HDD
32gb ddr4 ram

any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[HoneyBadger]

Hi Robert,

ZFS is "software RAID" in a way, and absolutely does not utilize or get along with a hardware RAID card. You want to present raw drives directly to the operating system, without being in arrays of their own, and let FreeNAS/ZFS handle the data mirroring/parity.

That's a good system you've got there. What will its purpose be? It seems a bit overkill for general home media storage, so I assume you want to run heavier storage workloads on this. If so, configure it as "RAID10" with multiple mirrored vdevs.

 

[HoneyBadger]

I'll also leave a link to Cyberjock's excellent PPT/PDF presentation here that explains a fair bit. It's long but well worth the read if you're new to ZFS.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ning-vdev-zpool-zil-and-l2arc-for-noobs.7775/

 

[Robert Hart]

It will mainly be for plex server using direct stream but the odd bit of transcoding here and there. Im on my 3rd Nas drive due to an ever growing media collection and want to be future proof for longer than a year which is the maximum I've had my current nas drive for.

is there a performance difference between software and hardware raids? or reliability? thanks for your help

 

[HoneyBadger]

Well, that setup will certainly give you "future proof" power. You can safely reduce the CPU to a Xeon E3, as we've had a few folks here run them and report being able to transcode multiple 1080p streams without breaking a sweat. For further savings, reduce the RAM to 16GB (2x8GB) which shouldn't impact streaming/transcoding if it's just one or two devices. Leave the option open for expansion down the road though. But with the extra money you save from not going E5/32GB, you can probably buy more drives.

For your drive configuration I'd say RAIDZ2 in your case since your workload is less sensitive to latency, which will also give you more usable space.

With modern CPUs performance is a non-issue if not outright faster in software, and ZFS is (in my opinion) much more reliable than a hardware RAID controller.

 

[Robert Hart]

Thanks again. do you think a supermicro X10SL7-F and E3-1270 v3 would be good enough then? does the CPU need to have on-board graphics? so choose the E3-1275 v3 instead due to the transcoding?

 

[HoneyBadger]

The SuperMicro board has an onboard graphics chip, so it likely won't use the Intel iGPU. Regardless of that, FreeNAS has no drivers for the Intel iGPU so you won't be able to leverage QuickSync. With that said, if the price difference is minimal ($5-$10) I'd buy the 1275 just in case I decide to rehome it down the road to a board where the iGPU would be useful.

The X10SL7-F and E3-1270v3 should be more than sufficient for transcoding multiple streams, and will save you a pretty penny over the E5.

 

[Robert Hart]

Thanks for your help and advice, greatly appreciated.

 

[Ericloewe]

Nope, the iGPU won't be doing anything. There is no graphics circuitry on the board, besides that of the BMC.

 

[jgreco]

And the on-CPU graphics burns watts and costs money. Don't want it with a SuperMicro board.