BUILD Small Business Build - Have I made a mistake somewhere?

[David3D]

Hi guys,

I'm in the process of putting together a server for a small business. We are a design/printing company. Design files for illustrator and photoshop as well as various applications for printers are served from a central location and saved back. I'm looking at a RAIDZ2 configuration for 12TB of usable storage with a two disk fault tolerance.

I wanted to come up with something fast-ish that won't end up over-kill. I've done a lot of reading here and I hope it's paid off. Here is the build:

CHASSIS: Standard 2U Workgroup rackmount chassis
Motherboard: Supermicro board of some description/Have not decided yet
CPU: CPU Intel XEON E3-1230 V3 4C/8T 3.3GHZ 8MB CACHE
MEMORY: 32GB DDR3-1600 SDRAM (4X 8GB ECC CL11 DIMMS)
HARD DISK: 8X 4TB Enterprise drives
RAID CARD: Undecided (Possibly Adaptec 6805E 8 Port SAS/SATA PCI-E RAID Controller - Need to check if it will be OK - No particular preference)
Power Supply: Redundant 740W power supplies (Overkill, but about all I can get my hands on with this configuration)

If anyone has any suggestions or can pick up any short falls or places I might be able to improve, let me know.

Cheers,
David

 

[danb35]

For an optimal RAIDZ2 configuration that will meet your capacity requirements, you only need 6x 4 TB drives (actually, 6x 3 TB will do it). A SuperMicro X9SCL board (which I'm using, with that same CPU) has 6 SATA ports, so you can run all the drives from the motherboard. A RAID controller is not needed or desirable with ZFS, but if you need more drive ports, the IBM M1015 seems to be very popular--it would give you 8 more drives' capacity, on top of the 6 drives that the motherboard will handle. I'd expect 16 GB of RAM would be adequate, though I'm sure more won't hurt.

 

[Z300M]

Hi guys,

I'm in the process of putting together a server for a small business. We are a design/printing company. Design files for illustrator and photoshop as well as various applications for printers are served from a central location and saved back. I'm looking at a RAIDZ2 configuration for 12TB of usable storage with a two disk fault tolerance.

I wanted to come up with something fast-ish that won't end up over-kill. I've done a lot of reading here and I hope it's paid off. Here is the build:

CHASSIS: Standard 2U Workgroup rackmount chassis
Motherboard: Supermicro board of some description/Have not decided yet
CPU: CPU Intel XEON E3-1230 V3 4C/8T 3.3GHZ 8MB CACHE
MEMORY: 32GB DDR3-1600 SDRAM (4X 8GB ECC CL11 DIMMS)
HARD DISK: 8X 4TB Enterprise drives
RAID CARD: Undecided (Possibly Adaptec 6805E 8 Port SAS/SATA PCI-E RAID Controller - Need to check if it will be OK - No particular preference)
Power Supply: Redundant 740W power supplies (Overkill, but about all I can get my hands on with this configuration)

If anyone has any suggestions or can pick up any short falls or places I might be able to improve, let me know.

Cheers,
David

The Supermicro X10SL7-F has a total of 12 hard-disk ports on board -- 8 LSILogic SAS ports that will also handle SATA drives, plus 2 additional SATA3 ports and 4 SATA2 ports. So for the number of hard disks you're planning to use you don't need any other card. The X9SCL motherboard has just the 6 SATA ports -- and it uses a Xeon E3... V2 CPU. Flash the on-board LSILogic controller to IT mode: you do not want hardware RAID.

If you go for an X10-series board, make sure you get RAM that is on Supermicro's "Tested RAM" list: Hynix or Samsung. Kingston no longer has 8GB modules on their recommended list for those motherboards.