So you want some hardware suggestions.

[warri]

True, I'll edit my post accordingly. But usually you can't really buy power supplies smaller than 300W for general purposes - and that should still be fine.

 

[no_connection]

My system with four WD RED idles around 50W but tops at above 90W or so at spinup.
While that is close to 5W extra per drive or so, it says nothing about the drives current draw from the supply thanks to how a switched PSU operates.

The datasheet for WD RED 4TB says 1.75A(1.925A due to 10% margin) peak which is over five times it's R/W usage(RMS at least). I highly doubt they would exaggerate that number as lower is better in this case.

Still, a good 200W PSU could survive 400W peaks with no trouble while a 400W PSU could break at 300W continuous use.
Which is why proven and tested PSUs is recommended. Preferably tested independently by a guy with scope and test gear.

 

[AlainD]

@warri, Please do not advise people to under-estimate their spin watts. Most drives take nearly 2 amps on the 12 volt to spin up, putting the current required for spin at around 20-25 watts per drive, NOT including the power for the board electronics (a few watts). Even the lowest power 3.5" drives take at least 1.2A, which is still 14 watts, just for spin, plus the idle watts for the electronics.

Underestimating your spin current on a PC is harmless since you're only talking one or two drives and you should have sufficient headroom. However, on a NAS, this is an important variable, because eight drives means that you need to account for an extra 150-200W of capacity just for spin. If you use an under-rated supply, either you will stress the components in the supply (leading to premature supply failure) or you will experience voltage sag (leading to premature drive failure). Neither of these are good things.

Hi

Based on what I hear (from my system), the drives are not spinning up at the same on my box. This would mean that the peak draw on my system is spread over a couple of seconds and this is really nice. This also seems rather logical.

 

[nunavat2012]

Oded:

Hi all,

I'm getting ready for my next build. I think I am pretty set on the following:

- ASRock C2750D4I Motherboard

A newbie here. What is your current build? I would like to use that board too. Only negative thing that I read (and comprehended) was that the CPU is soldered to the board.

 

[jgreco]

Hi

Based on what I hear (from my system), the drives are not spinning up at the same on my box. This would mean that the peak draw on my system is spread over a couple of seconds and this is really nice. This also seems rather logical.

As long as you do not cause your drives to sleep, and you've got them set for staggered spin-up in the BIOS, you may be okay. The moment they sleep while FreeNAS is running, however, you run the very real risk that a task might cause reads to happen from several drives simultaneously, waking them all at once, which is then seriously hazardous to your system.

Generally speaking there is little benefit to be gained, since a larger supply - capable of spinning eight or ten drives, even, in tandem - is only marginally more expensive. It is also safe.

But it is your equipment. If you fry your drives, be aware that it may be difficult to go RMA'ing several drives that have all failed due to voltage sag.

 

[cyberjock]

FYI: Some disks do not support staggered spin-up. So even if you enable it there's no guarantee the disks will actually behave properly.

In short, do NOT undersize your PSU. You'll be very unhappy and we will all laugh at you for such a noobie mistake.

 

[Oded]

@jgreco, @cyberjock - thanks for the input. Sounds like you'd recommend the 450W model to be on the safe side? ​

​

Silverstone Tek 450W​

http://www.amazon.com/Silverstone-T...id=1398101776&sr=1-1&keywords=Silverstone SFX​

I have to ask because I understand NOTHING when it comes to power and electricity, does 450W power supply means that it will take more power from the wall all the time 24/7, leading to higher electric bills each year? Or is this really negligible? The price difference between the two is really a non-issue.​

By the way, I have to give kudos to iXsystems, the more I research the gear I have to buy, the more the Freenas Mini makes more sense to me. The price difference is really not that big, especially for the diskless system, and you get something that you know will work great. My only gripe is that you're limited to 4 drives, and that's not good in the long run.

 

[AlainD]

As long as you do not cause your drives to sleep, and you've got them set for staggered spin-up in the BIOS, you may be okay. The moment they sleep while FreeNAS is running, however, you run the very real risk that a task might cause reads to happen from several drives simultaneously, waking them all at once, which is then seriously hazardous to your system.

Generally speaking there is little benefit to be gained, since a larger supply - capable of spinning eight or ten drives, even, in tandem - is only marginally more expensive. It is also safe.

But it is your equipment. If you fry your drives, be aware that it may be difficult to go RMA'ing several drives that have all failed due to voltage sag.

My PSU is big enough, don't worry. (It's not so easy to buy a small quality PSU anyway.) I just noticed the staggered spin-up.

 

[Shroom]

Hi all,

I'm getting ready for my next build. I think I am pretty set on the following:


- ASRock C2750D4I Motherboard
- Silverstone DS380 Case
- Kingston KVR16N11K2/16 2x8gb kit (will add another 16gb in the future as needed)
- 4 x WD RED 4Tb hard drives in RAIDZ1 (I think... still considering if I need RAIDZ2)

In the future, when I'll need to, I will add another pool of RAIDZ1 with another set of 4 x WD Red 4Tb drives and another set of 2x8Gb RAM.

A few questions:

1. Which power supply should I get? I ofcourse want to the most efficient low-power supply, yet one that could run everything in the future, in the 8-drives configuration.
2. Any point in RAIDZ2? I have a current system that I'll use as an off-site backup for the critical files using RSYNC. The current system is more modest: 4x2Tb drives (1 Red, 3 Green), Intel Atom 525 with 4Gb Non-ECC ram (but the processor can only see 3gb). I use NAS4FREE on the current machine because FREENAS was insanely slow while NAS4FREE was able to serve the files without issue despite the limitations.
3. Any changes you'll make to the setup?
4. How would you recommend I'll setup the OS itself? Does freenas run fine from a USB stick like NAS4FREE, or is that not the recommended approach?
5. The DS380 has 4 additional internal bays in 2.5" form. Can I use one of those as a cache disk for ZFS using an SSD? If so, any recommendations on an SSD to use and what size?
6. Last, I guess I know the answer but I'll ask again: Is deduplication still a bad idea for home systems like the one I described? I did manage to crash my zpool when I enabled deduplication a few years ago on the old machine, but as you can see I had really low RAM and hardware :).

Thanks!

I would actually recommend the SuperMicro C2750 over the ASRock.

You probably wouldn't benefit much from an SSD for L2ARC

 

[Oded]

I would actually recommend the SuperMicro C2750 over the ASRock.

You probably wouldn't benefit much from an SSD for L2ARC

Thanks, I considered it but it only has 6 sata ports...

 

[jgreco]

@jgreco, @cyberjock - thanks for the input. Sounds like you'd recommend the 450W model to be on the safe side? ​

​

Silverstone Tek 450W​

http://www.amazon.com/Silverstone-T...id=1398101776&sr=1-1&keywords=Silverstone SFX​

I have to ask because I understand NOTHING when it comes to power and electricity, does 450W power supply means that it will take more power from the wall all the time 24/7, leading to higher electric bills each year? Or is this really negligible? The price difference between the two is really a non-issue.​

By the way, I have to give kudos to iXsystems, the more I research the gear I have to buy, the more the Freenas Mini makes more sense to me. The price difference is really not that big, especially for the diskless system, and you get something that you know will work great. My only gripe is that you're limited to 4 drives, and that's not good in the long run.

The 450W is an 80plus gold rated supply and may well have a fairly flat efficiency curve over the range you're likely to need. The ASRock C2750 base system shouldn't take much power but has lots of expansion capability in terms of SATA ports. In the extreme case of 12 drives, that could be as much as maybe 350 watts (spin included) or as low as maybe 50 watts (4 drives/idle). If you ABSOLUTELY know you'll never go out past maybe 8 drives, the 450 is maybe a bit big. 50 watts is around 10% load, and the supply might be less efficient at that loading. It's hard to know for sure. I have some nice Kingwin STR-500 platinum supplies running ESXi nodes that idle around 40 watts.

 

[Lordadmiral Drake]

So you say staggered spinup must be supported by the drive? I thought that was a mobo-only dependent feature since all HDDs can (AFAIK) be ordered to spin up/down by the controller anyway
In extension of this, with redundant 900W PSU my system should be safe without staggered spin-up, even with the maximum 16 HDDs installed (currently only one) 16*25W = 400?

On a side note, I just had a major facepalm over at the hardwareluxx forums
Someone had problems with his server (under WHS '11, and he had his hardware in the OP) and everyone was like "install FreeNAS" and "FreeNAS all the way"
The he was like "will it work on my HW" and they were like "yea, just go ahead, no problems"

Only that his HW list included an AMD A8 series APU, some desktop mobo and consequently no ECC Ram

I just had to make a post to point out all the flaws in this.

 

[Oded]

I found this useful ASUS calculator for recommended power supply:

http://support.asus.com/powersupply.aspx

For 8 drives they recommend 400 watts. I'll go with the 450Watts power supply to be on the safe side.

 

[panz]

I have a 650 Watts PSU for 12 drives.

 

[DJVege]

This is an awesome thread with great suggestions. Thumbs up to OP. While I'd love to get that FreeNAS mini (pretty sexy), the shipping cost to Australia ($US 239) makes it better to buy locally (well, I'd save about $300+ AUD). I've managed to stick to the suggestions as best I could, but wouldn't mind a keen eye to go over it before any purchases are made.

Supermicro X9SCM-F mobo - $299
Lian Li PC-Q25B MiniITX Case Black - $138
Antec 450W True Power Classic. 80Plus Gold - $100
Intel Quad Core Xeon CPU E3-1230v2 - $238
Kingston 8GB KVR13E9-8I 1333MHz DDR3 ECC Unbuffered CL9 DIMM with Thermal Sensor, E3 Series Xeon CPU - $149 x 2
Western Digital RED WD40EFRX RED NAS- 4TB/INTELLIPOWER/DDR2/3.5 - $235 x 4

 

[KempelofDoom]

I'm looking at using an LSI 9211-8i along with an Intel Port Multiplier. Anyone use either of those? The comments for the LSI say it's great for ZFS but I want to be sure. The port multiplier seems like a convenient way to connect all of the drives in my case but I know that convenience usually has negatives as well. I can't get much info on the situation but I wonder how well the drives would perform compared to if they were connected to their own controller. Also, how would I connect the 2? The manuals I found online don't really describe in simple terms how that's done.

 

[cyberjock]

The 9211-8i is the same as the M1015. It's a great card for ZFS, but the M1015 is probably alot cheaper.

And a port multiplier won't work. This isn't SATA. This is SAS. You will need a SAS expander. I'm using the M1015 with an Intel SAS expander and I've got zero complaints.

 

[Oded]

I'm now considering the 1U12LW over a solution like the Silvertek DS380. Seems a lot more practical to be honest... I noticed some comments in these forums about potential incompatibility with Kingston RAM. I got Crucial 32gb so I think I'll be good in that department.

Price wise, adding up I see about 200-300 difference compared to the DS380 solution. BUT, I do get an option for using the whole 12 drives, rack-mountable solution, and a matching power supply (surprisingly only 250 watts? that would become an issue with 12 drives, no?).

This makes a 6 drive RAIDZ2 setup more practical and economical, because I won't have to buy 8 drives up-front like in the DS380 option. Also, 32RAM would be a great match for 6x4tb, while 32RAM for 8x4tb is stretching the limit. That way I can upgrade to 64gb RAM when it's more economical and when I need extra space.

Link:

http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=1U12LW-C2750

Review by fellow forum member jgreco:

http://www.sol.net/hardware/avoton/asrock-1u12lw-c2750/page1/

 

[KempelofDoom]

Are you using the Intel RAID Twenty-four port Expander Card RES2SV240? If not what model are you using? That's the card I want to use. It appears that I can plug multiple expander cards in and extend the LSI's control so I could potentially add in an expansion case for a total of 48 drives. That whole expander concept is completely new to me so please forgive the ignorance.

 

[jgreco]

The 1U12LW is an intriguing bit of hardware. I have one on the bench but I got waylaid by the Elpida RAM issue, and lost several weeks trying to play "find the workable RAM."

Two primary concerns I have are that the power supply is under-spec in terms of watts, see comments in the review. ASRock's response was to show me the math for spinning drive power consumption, which wasn't much of an answer. I read it as "well, that's what we put in, sorry." The length and mounting bracket situation is also a little curious.

Still, I have been very impressed with the Avoton and the ASRock board overall. It would be an awesome selection for a nearline or backup ZFS storage server if one remediated the few issues. I intend to finish up with that review soon, but finding free time recently has been a bit of a challenge.