Revised Parts List: Newbie FreeNAS Build

[thebill]

Hey all,

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE FOR THE FANTASTIC ADVICE SO FAR! Seriously, this community is awesome.

This is a follow up thread to my original thread (link). After much advice that was a great help and research (many thanks to Chris Moore's parts list which I borrowed from heavily), I've shifted from primarily new hardware to primarily used server hardware that will net me around $500 in cost savings and significantly higher CPU performance compared to the original BOM.

I'd appreciate a quick once-over to make sure I didn't screw anything up in the parts list. Especially in the Mobo-RAM-CPU department.

Just to reiterate from the old thread, this is the design intent of the server: This NAS is intended to serve two functions: file serving to both windows and linux users and transcoding of up to 2 simultaneous 1080p video streams via DLNA (which this processor, with a passmark of ~13k should be more than enough to handle).

Parts List:

Case: Fractal Design R5
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNova 550
CPU: INTEL XEON E5-2650V2
Cooler: Noctua NH-U9DX i4
Motherboard: Supermicro X9SRL-F
Memory: 2x Samsung 16GB ECC REG Server DDR3 1600MHz PC3-12800R RDIMM Registered Ram
HBA (and associated cabling): Dell H310 6Gbps SAS HBA
Boot Drive: 2x Intel 320 SSD 80GB (mirrored)
SLOG: Intel SSD DC S3610 200GB
Storage Array Drives: 4x WD Red 8TB
UPS: CyberPower CP1500AVRLCD

 

[anmnz]

Nothing wrong here that I can see. If it was me, I would change the following (but nothing says your choices have to be the same as mine!). (a) Put off buying an HBA until I needed one; that board has 10 SATA ports which appears to cover your needs for now. (b) Put off buying a SLOG until I could prove it would be useful; are you sure your workload is going to involve a lot of sync writes? (c) I'd not bother mirroring the boot drive; but that is pretty much just personal preference.

 

[thebill]

Nothing wrong here that I can see. If it was me, I would change the following (but nothing says your choices have to be the same as mine!). (a) Put off buying an HBA until I needed one; that board has 10 SATA ports which appears to cover your needs for now. (b) Put off buying a SLOG until I could prove it would be useful; are you sure your workload is going to involve a lot of sync writes? (c) I'd not bother mirroring the boot drive; but that is pretty much just personal preference.

Good catch - thank you. I misread the spec sheet and stopped at the SATA section but completely missed the 4 other ports on the SCU. Turns out I don't need the HBA after all.

As for the SLOG, the intended use for this NAS will be pretty sync write intensive so it seems like a good addition. At $14/ea (or so), mirroring the boot drive just seems easy and pretty economical, even if it is a bit overkill.

 

[Chris Moore]

As for the SLOG, the intended use for this NAS will be pretty sync write intensive so it seems like a good addition.

What are you doing that is sync write?

 

[thebill]

What are you doing that is sync write?

Shares from the NAS will be mounted as NFS shares on target systems and it'll also be used as a backup target for several systems that have large amounts of data changing daily on their internal hard drives.

As far as I understand both of these operations are written to the NAS as sync writes but I'd love to know if that is just a misconception on my part.

 

[anmnz]

Yes NFS normally requires sync writes. I was presuming as you said you had both Windows and Linux clients you would be using SMB. (Note that using both at once on the same dataset is risky.)

 

[thebill]

Yes NFS normally requires sync writes. I was presuming as you said you had both Windows and Linux clients you would be using SMB. (Note that using both at once on the same dataset is risky.)

They're planned to be on different shares :) The windows clients data needs are completely different from the linux side and I figured for the linux clients NFS would be easier as it's native.