Second build validation

[George51]

So - I have got myself hooked on FreeNAS, and currently looking for a bit of an upgrade - I am a while off pulling the trigger, but what to start sourcing what I want and checking that it will all work (hopefully) flawlessly.

I'm looking at currently:

Motherboard: X10DRH-iT
Chasis: SC826BA-R920LPB
HBA: M1015 (Low profile, flashed to IT mode)
RAM: Undecided - probably 4x 16 gb 2133 ECC
CPU: Undecided, but 2 x a E5-2600v3
SATADOM: 2 x mirrored for boot. (Board has two powered ports)

The aim is to have 2 x RAIDz2 vdevs, with 6 drives in each, with 10GBase-T ports. I did initially look at a chasis with a SAS3 backplane, and therefore the board with the onboard LSI 3108. But as I will only be using mechanical disks, and support for SAS3 is flakely currently, I assumed it would best to avoid?
I want the whole thing to be very upgradeable - so 16 RAM slots is ideal, as I can keep adding RAM as I want. That was also why I started with the SAS3 stuff.

So questions I have:

With the M1015 its got two SFF-8087 ports, the backplane on the chasis has 3x SFF-8087 ports, and as I understand it, each port is good for 4 HDD's? So does that mean I need two M1015's for 12 HDD's? Using three SFF-8087 cables?
Also would I have to flash/check/change the firmware on that backplane? Or as long as I put the M1015 into IT mode, that will be the drives good to go?

Cheers

 

[Lordadmiral Drake]

Yes, you'll need 2 M1015's or 1 card with 4 ports

 

[depasseg]

What model backplane? I think you are confusing channels and drives. Each channel can support multiple drives. And the backplanes usually have an "outgoing" port to support daisy-chaining drive chassis.
Look at appendix E:
http://www.supermicro.com/manuals/chassis/2U/SC826.pdf

 

[ALFA]

Wow, almost what I have in mind. Only one word of avise, stay away from the LSI 3108 (or any SAS-3 controller), I think is not well supported by FreeNas or at least is not very stable at the moment and there are some issues with the backward compatibility (SAS3 cards connect to a SAS2 backplanes) too, and from what I hear one time from Ericloewe is that it's not worth it unless you have a bunch of SSD. Beside I think that if you want some benefits from it you need some 12 Gb/s enterprise hdd (until you get bottleneck by your Gigabit LAN) and that are a lot of cash, but that is my opinion.

Kind regards.

 

[marbus90]

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/2U/826/SC826E16-R500LP.cfm?parts=SHOW
^ 500W PSUs and a SAS Expander, maybe preferable together with an AOC-2308L-L8E HBA.

What do you plan on doing with that? a dozen plex transcoding sessions?

 

[George51]

What model backplane? I think you are confusing channels and drives. Each channel can support multiple drives. And the backplanes usually have an "outgoing" port to support daisy-chaining drive chassis.
Look at appendix E:
http://www.supermicro.com/manuals/chassis/2U/SC826.pdf

I may well be - I was under the impression each port from the M1015 could connect to 4 hard drives, so I guess one channel per 4 drives?

2U Direct Attached Backplane, features:
• Up to 6Gb support
• SES-2 Enclosure Management Support
• SAS/SATA support
• Three SFF 8087 connectors

That is what supermicro has to say about the backplane, I assume I need to connect all three connectors... And as Lordadmrial Drake said, means I will need two M1015's, or a card with four ports, any recommendations on a 4 port card?

Marbus90 thats certainly worth looking at, aim is to be entirely future proof, I do maybe 4 transcodes now, but I want more capability, and with adding a second vdev, more RAM and another CPU is certainly over kill but its what I'm looking for going forward.

 

[marbus90]

depasseg was describing expander backplanes.

If you want that much future-proofness by a factor of 2-3x, go for a Supermicro 846E16 or 847BE16 with 2x Xeon E5-2643 v3. Don't forget to grab a board with 24 DIMM slots and use only 8x32GB LRDIMMs from the start, upgrade to 24x32GB DIMMs later on.

It'll still look old and slow in 3 years.

 

[George51]

depasseg was describing expander backplanes.

If you want that much future-proofness by a factor of 2-3x, go for a Supermicro 846E16 or 847BE16 with 2x Xeon E5-2643 v3. Don't forget to grab a board with 24 DIMM slots and use only 8x32GB LRDIMMs from the start, upgrade to 24x32GB DIMMs later on.

It'll still look old and slow in 3 years.

Okay, okay point taken. For my use however it will be future proof to a certain extent. Any "FreeNAS recommended" cards instead of the M1015 that have four ports? Or is getting two of those the best way to go?

 

[cyberjock]

There are no good 4-port controllers, hence we don't have any in the recommended hardware list. :P

 

[marbus90]

Get a chassis with an expander backplane, use 1 8port SAS for all 12 drives or connect the 4 other bays to the Intel SATA ports. 16port controllers use more energy than 2 8port controllers and are more expensive. If you want to do plex transcoding, that's where futureproofing starts. 6 transcodes max? E5-1650 v3 does the needful. With only 12 HDDs and archival/cold storage (I don't think you'll be running VMs off there with 2 raidz2 vdevs) you won't need that much RAM anyway.

Alternative HBAs are LSI 9211, LSI 9207 and Supermicro AOC-S2308L-L8e

There are no good 4-port controllers, hence we don't have any in the recommended hardware list. :P

While 8 lanes/2ports is the go-to thing, there are acceptable 4lane/1port and 16lane/4port cards. Just not that preferable, available and cost-effective. ;)

 

[Ericloewe]

There are no good 4-port controllers, hence we don't have any in the recommended hardware list. :p

Get a chassis with an expander backplane, use 1 8port SAS for all 12 drives or connect the 4 other bays to the Intel SATA ports. 16port controllers use more energy than 2 8port controllers and are more expensive. If you want to do plex transcoding, that's where futureproofing starts. 6 transcodes max? E5-1650 v3 does the needful. With only 12 HDDs and archival/cold storage (I don't think you'll be running VMs off there with 2 raidz2 vdevs) you won't need that much RAM anyway.

Alternative HBAs are LSI 9211, LSI 9207 and Supermicro AOC-S2308L-L8e


While 8 lanes/2ports is the go-to thing, there are acceptable 4lane/1port and 16lane/4port cards. Just not that preferable, available and cost-effective. ;)

The good four-port controllers are actually the very same LSI SAS 2008s and 2308s, but with only four channels connected, instead of all eight. So yeah, no good choices there.