BUILD Recommendations on CPU/Mobo/RAM for a Media & Backup build

[ADVERSiTY]

I've been looking to build an NAS for quite some time now and I've finally got the cash to throw one together. I''ve done research here and there over several months but there's just so many options, to say it can be a little overwhelming at times is an understatement. Although my budget can go as high as $1500 I'd prefer to keep the bare, drive-less system to around $500-$750. My needs aren't all that demanding IMO.

First and foremost this NAS is going to serve media files, and more specifically my backed-up Blurays. Currently it will only be serving 2 HTPC clients, but room for expansion is good as this will surely grow. It will also house backups from various PCs around the house, as well as OS images, steamapps folder backup, etc. I'm planning on starting out with a minimum of 3x 3TB WD Red HDDs, possibly 4 if budget permits (I already have one) run in a RAIDZ. Power consumption is not highest priority but seeing as the system is on 24/7 the lower the better.

I'm not dead-set on it but I've been considering going the ECC RAM route, but if that's overkill I'm happy spending less. I was also thinking of getting an IBM M1015 SAS card w/ SATA breakout cables. While the M1015 is not absolutely necessary at this point, it would be nice for future expansion. Can the M1015 be added later and the array moved to it? Or is there a high-risk for data loss this way? If the M1015 now is less headache later than I'm willing to drop the coin now.

Really what I'm looking for is a recomendation on CPU/Mobo/RAM. One combo I've been looking into is an i3-2120T & Asus P8B-X w/ 16GB DDR3 1333 ECC. I imagine this is overkill on CPU/Mobo though, which is why I'm seeking advice here. I'm going 16GB minimum RAM whatever route I go though.

Any help would be tremendously appreciated!

 

[jgreco]

The M1015 if crossflashed to IT firmware is a great card for FreeNAS and you can move your drives from a standard SATA port to it without problems. If you try it without crossflashing, you'll lose your filesystems and your data.

Your CPU doesn't support ECC (iirc) so don't feel compelled to shell out extra cash for ECC.

 

[KMR]

Check out my thread. I built basically what you are describing (minus the M1015, which can be added later in IT mode) for about $1500 including 6 3TB drives and the UPS.

As for ECC.. it doesn't add much to the build cost if you get the right motherboard and CPU.

 

[ADVERSiTY]

Looking at the Intel ARK, there is no mention of ECC for the i3-2120T. Searching the web yields no definitive answer to which Intel CPU's support it either, other than Xeon's obviously. That seems a bit overkill for my needs, but the extra peace-of-mind from ECC would be nice to have. Seems as though ECC on non-server class Intel CPU's is hit or miss, and depends alot on motherboard choice, where going server class makes more sense.

Is it safe to assume that just about any C20x chipset mobo will suit my needs? Or is even an H61 or Z77 chipset suitable for an HD Media Streaming NAS? I don't intend to do any transcoding or really anything except serving bluray remuxes and some pictures & music here and there. And as mentioned the NAS will serve as another means of backup as well.

I'm putting together two identical HTPCs as well, with either OpenELEC or XBMC over Windows installed on each. They will handle the decoding.

 

[KMR]

I bought a Pentium G2020 for cheap and it supports ECC.

 

[HolyK]

I also have G2020, but i just realized that it does NOT have AES-NI ( http://ark.intel.com/products/71070 ), so no native encryption instruction set for FreeNAS GELI :(

 

[KMR]

I haven't played with the built in encryption functionality yet although I think the processor would just be slower at encryption. I use Truecrypt for encryption which provides a lot of flexibility.

 

[ADVERSiTY]

I still can't decide on which route to go as far as CPU & Motherboard are concerned :(.

I ordered three more 3TB WD Red HDDs, giving me four drives total to start with. I also went ahead and purchased an M1015 HBA to use as well. Now all I need to do is make a decision on CPU/Mobo, which seems to be the same place I started lol. I also need to decide how to best utilize the drives (RAIDZ/RAIDZ2, hot-spare/no hot-spare, etc).

 

[KMR]

Best bet is RAIDZ2.. Maybe buy another 2 3tb drives so you can get a 6 disk vdev. If you are going with a server class motherboard for ECC support you really won't need the M1015 at this point; you will just end up with unused SATA ports and a larger power bill. Keep things cheap and buy a low end CPU that supports ECC and can be easily upgraded and get a server class motherboard that supports the features you want.

Pentium G2020, Supermicro X9SCL MB, 16GB ECC RAM = ~$500. It will handle anything you can throw at it with 6 drives and leaves plenty of room for upgrades.

 

[HolyK]

Like KMR said. If you don't need native encryption instruction set, go for G2020 which is cheap, low TDP and still powerfull CPU. I also have this CPU and i can pull approx 100Mb/s transfer speed over Gbit network via CIFS without CPU hiccup. The encryption will still work but there will be performance hit.

FreeNAS Documentation:

If the system has a lot of disks, there will be a performance hit if the CPU does not support AES-NI. Without hardware acceleration, there will be about a 20% performance hit for a single disk. Performance degradation will continue to increase with more disks. As data is written, it is automatically encrypted and as data is read, it is decrypted on the fly. If the processor does support the AES-NI instruction set, there should be very little, if any, degradation in performance when using encryption.

 

[cyberjock]

Personally, from my experimenting with AES on modern hardware, I'd never recommend you use encryption if you don't have a CPU that supports AES-NI. Performance can range pretty wildly. I think my Xeon E5606 only did something like 300-400MB/sec with AES-NI disabled and 100% CPU usage per Truecrypt benchmark tests. As soon as I enabled AES-NI I got something like 1.2GB/sec encryption with CPU usage at like 5%!

Considering the CPU would also need to handle loading for Samba and ZFS I'd be scared to see how the system would actually perform. Especially if a scrub is in progress! LOL.

If anyone knows how to run some kind of geli benchmark(perhaps using a ramdisk) I can test the difference in FreeBSD on my machine just for comparison.

Edit: I found http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2013-January/071606.html. I do realize that this only compares 2 different encryption forms and doesn't compare AES-NI versus non-AES-NI. The commands it uses are:

Code:

# kldload geom_eli
# kldload geom_zero
# sysctl kern.geom.zero.clear=0
# geli onetime  -s 4096 -l 256 -e aes-cbc gzero
# dd if=/dev/gzero.eli of=/dev/null bs=1m count=4096
# geli kill gzero
# geli onetime  -s 4096 -l 256 -e aes-xts gzero
# dd if=/dev/gzero.eli of=/dev/null bs=1m count=4096

The first 3 lines seem to work fine but as soon as I type line for I get a crash. I actually can't find much on benchmarking geli on various processors for any kind of good comparision. Perhaps I'm not suing the appropriate keywords to get good search results. I was hoping once I got these to work I could figure out how to enable/disable AES-NI. I think I can unload the aesni support with kldunload aesni but I haven't gotten that far yet.

I figure we should probably start collecting a database of CPU benchmarks for encryption because I'm guessing there's going to be alot of questions in the future about performance for various CPUs.

 

[HolyK]

It would be nice to have some real numbers of performance hit in case of encryption on not-aes-ni supporting CPUs.

if i will do some *stupid* math and consider that for one disc it is 20% performance hit, so i could assume that it will be like 120% for 6 discs.
So in case that Samba will burn CPU to 50% during CIFS transfer on unencrypted pool, it will be like 110% CPU load on encrypted load ==> CPU overload

Still this is only an theorycraft :/

 

[cyberjock]

I've made a thread with instructions for testing encryption performance...


http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?12157-Encryption-performance-benchmarks

 

[ADVERSiTY]

I don't really have a need for encryption, AFAIK. There won't be anything on the NAS that would cause me concern if someone got their hands on it. It's mostly just a central location for all my movies and TV Shows to serve to HTPCs and various media devices throughout the house.

I have the original disc's should anything be lost as well, but obviously I'd prefer the redundancy as it is time consuming. So I'm wondering if a RAIDZ with a hot-spare is a better way for me to utilize the 4 disks I'm starting out with? Or RAIDZ2?