RAM-Cache-Log

[wlfman]

Hello guys,

I'm in process of building a FreeNAS appliance for my home network, pretty much to get rid of internal hard drives and store multimedia stuff.
Clients are:
1 .XBMC "server" (Zotac Nano) which plays movies/tv shows/music currently from USB3.0 dual drive external box
2. 2 laptops and 1 desktop. I'd like to store my documents/iso files/backups etc on FreeNAS box. No heavy usage from them really.

Hardware that I have for this is following:
Fractal Node 304 case
ASRock E3C226D2I Mini ITX
Intel Xeon E3-1230V3 CPU
16GB kit (2x8GB) Kingston ECC KVR13E9K2/16I
StarTech PEXSAT34 sata3 controller (4internal + 1esata) based on Marvell 88SE9128
6x Seagate 4TB ST4000DM00 (to be connected to motherboard sata ports)
2x Corsair Force3 120GB SSD
2x Seagate 1TB 2,5"
1x Corsair Voyager 32GB for OS
1x of some APC UPS (still didn't get it)

Now my plan was to use these 6x4TB in RAIDZ2 layout (with encryption, no compression) and I'd appreciate advices regarding following stuff from you:

1. Will 16GB of RAM be enough for this setup (set aside rule of thumb 1GB/1TB )
2. Any idea how and should I at all utilize those 2 SSDs and 1TB Seagates (cache/log and maybe temp storage, I'd like to download torrents on FreeNAS box and have media available to XBMC)
3. Do u recommend use of iSCSI to present data to XBMC/laptops/desktop (all use Windows 7)?
4. All devices are using wired 1Gbit connections and I'm planning FreeNAS to use 2 teamed 1Gbit adapters with LACP, can I expect single host read/write performance of around 100MB/s?

Thanks

 

[joeschmuck]

Your hardware appears to be fine for FreeNAS. The RAM should be sufficient for the usage you specified. The rule of thumb really comes into play for the first 8GB for a typical home system and then again if you are planning a more heavy workload or a ton of RAM if you plan to use deduplication.

From what I know iSCSI can work but many folks tend to have issues so if you don't need it, I'd recommend leaving it alone. If you do want it, just search the forums for folks having issues and how they resolved them. The 1Gb LAN connections, you can expect 80MB/sec or better [over CIFS] but the encryption I believe will be the bottle neck in your system. Without encryption you can expect 92MB/sec or better for large file transfers. Of course things get quickly slower when you are dealing with small files.

I would not recommend using your extra drives as a cache or L2ARC, you will gain nothing at all expect higher power consumption and something else that could go wrong. You could take one of those drives and add it as a temporary storage, just create a RAIDZ1 single drive as a volume and have that available, just don't place any data on it that should the drive fail, you would be fine missing.

Good Luck and I'd run FreeNAS 9.2.0 right now, there are some bugs in 9.2.1 that you may not want to mess around with.

 

[wlfman]

thanks @joeschmuck :)

 

[joeschmuck]

When I said the encryption will be the bottleneck, I don't want to make you think that you will get substandard performance. Things will still be very quick, just don't expect to max out your network connection is all.