So you want some hardware suggestions.

[cyberjock]

You need to realize that TDP is theoretical maximum heat output. Idle will be less(how much less depends on what kind of settings you set in the BIOS). If you disable SpeedStep(or whatever its currently called) then your wattage will be higher than with it enabled.

My system, E3-1230V2(69W TDP) has a total system idle wattage of like 30w. I don't remember the exact number, but it was less than 35w idle. That included the CPU, 32GB of RAM, booted up and idle. No hard drives.

As for spinning down drives, I don't do it. It's bad for the drives to be cycled alot, many drives won't spin down even if you try, if you are using a jail they'll spin back up almost immediately after you force a spindown anyway, etc. So I don't have answers for spinning down because (to me) its really not worth the time and effort to try to save a few watts after all the time and effort you'll put into replacing disks prematurely, time trying to get it to work, etc. And keep in mind every time you startup a bunch of disks that starting surge is quite high. If you don't have a very beefy PSU you might burn it out prematurely too. And you definitely don't want a PSU to burn out, happen to overvolt the whole system, and fry every component in your system.

 

[Denton Yoder]

It's a little extra, but I found you can get s PSU with modular cables, so you don't have old style connectors or graphics board connectors filling your case. :) Works well, and helps with space.

 

[DoulosGeek]

Well...crap.

I bought an HP DL180/G6 with a P410 SATA/RAID controller, two quad core Xeon processors, 48GB RAM and 14 1TB drives...seemed like a good deal for $1,400

I have the P410 controller set up with 14 RAID0 volumes...which after reading much through the forum here is a big NO NO.

Question...with a M1015 (flashed) controller plug cleanly into the DL180 Backplane and give me all 14 drives?

 

[IanWorthington]

Looking for a motherboard for a Haswell Xeon, 32GB of ECC RAM, Intel 1Gbe, 8xSATA, and IPMI.

Looked at the new X10 versions of the recommended Supermicro mobos and it seems I can have 8xsata OR ipmi. Anyone know of anything with both for around the same $200 price point?

i

Edit: Looks like the Supermicro X10SL7, $240, may work? Missed it first time through as they only mention 6 SATA ports in the summary, not the additional 8 SAS/SATA ones...

 

[Denton Yoder]

I saw a "SYBA SI-PEX40072 PCI-Express 2.0 x2 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) 4 Internal + 4 Externa" for $100. I think the next NAS I build, I'll just pick the MB I want, and add a controller. Just make sure you have a PCI-X 2.0 slot. Has anyone tried Syba cards in FreeNAS?

 

[titan_rw]

I saw a "SYBA SI-PEX40072 PCI-Express 2.0 x2 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) 4 Internal + 4 Externa" for $100. I think the next NAS I build, I'll just pick the MB I want, and add a controller. Just make sure you have a PCI-X 2.0 slot. Has anyone tried Syba cards in FreeNAS?

Note that PCI-X is NOT the same as PCI-Express (PCI-E).

If you're going to spend $100, why not spend the $120 that the famous IBM M1015 is going for? PCI-E x8, 8 sata / sas 6Gb/s ports. Well known for it's good compatibility with FreeBSD / FreeNAS.

 

[IanWorthington]

Looking for a motherboard for a Haswell Xeon, 32GB of ECC RAM, Intel 1Gbe, 8xSATA, and IPMI.

Looked at the new X10 versions of the recommended Supermicro mobos and it seems I can have 8xsata OR ipmi. Anyone know of anything with both for around the same $200 price point?

i

Edit: Looks like the Supermicro X10SL7, $240, may work? Missed it first time through as they only mention 6 SATA ports in the summary, not the additional 8 SAS/SATA ones...

According to http://www.supermicro.com/support/resources/OS/C222.cfm the x10sl7 board is compatable with FreeBSD 9.1. Does that mean that it's automatically compatible with FreeNAS?

 

[John M. Długosz]

So instead of that ECS Golden Z77H2-AX(1.0) LGA 1155 Intel Z77 for $319, or that ASUS Maximum VI Extreme for $400, both of which would admittedly make for an awesome PC, look at some server-grade boards. You're making a server. Why use a gaming enthusiast's hardware? We've been having great luck with Supermicro's X9S lineup of 1155 boards, but Tyan, HP, IBM, Dell, and others make usable hardware too. Unsure if it's a server board? Good server boards typically lack audio ports.

The Supermicro X9SCM ($154-$170) has 4 SATA2 and 2 SATA3 ports, dual Intel gigabit ethernets, a bunch of USB2 ports, and can be put in a nice 1U unit if you wish. It'll support ECC error correction and log ECC events.

The Supermicro X9SCA ($170) has both PCI and PCIe slots for more flexibility with any legacy stuff you might have.

The Supermicro boards have variations with IPMI, which means that you can access the console video and keyboard remotely, attach USB devices remotely, and basically never have to plug anything except power and network into the unit. They're also intended to run 24/7, and the Supermicro people who provide support know that a "server" isn't the waiter in a restaurant. Bonus: you get (at least) dual Intel server ethernets, instead of learning later that your Realtek is garbage and needing to fork out $35 for an Intel add-on desktop ethernet card. That effectively reduces the cost of your board by $35 (or even $70 if you count the second interface).

So what about this one? I get the idea that all the X9's are small variations on the same thing. This one has the KVM-over-LAN. There is some variation on the LAN chipset: some use a different Intel number for one of the ports (but the same for the other, anyway).

The Xeon E3-1230v2 ...

The motherboards list "Xeon E3 series", "Xeon E3-1200 family", and "Xeon E3-1200 & v2 Series". How particular are they really? In particular, when I look up E3-1230 I see there is now a v3.

Also, they take Xeon E3 or second generation i3. What is the difference?

In general, your initial post makes it easy to shop. Thanks.

 

[John M. Długosz]

What about AMD processors? Although their initial release of the funny double-core module design didn't do well on the PC market, it seems that they are very attractive for servers because of the high performance per watt. I've found AMD to be much cheaper too.

 

[Dusan]

The motherboards list "Xeon E3 series", "Xeon E3-1200 family", and "Xeon E3-1200 & v2 Series". How particular are they really? In particular, when I look up E3-1230 I see there is now a v3.

Supermicro X9 boards will work with E3 v1 & E3 v2 CPUs. For E3 v3 CPUs (Haswell) you need one of the Supermicro X10 boards (http://www.supermicro.nl/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/#1150).

 

[cyberjock]

What about AMD processors? Although their initial release of the funny double-core module design didn't do well on the PC market, it seems that they are very attractive for servers because of the high performance per watt. I've found AMD to be much cheaper too.

I'd disagree. Here's one such example... http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8350-core-i7-3770k-gaming-bottleneck,3407-8.html

Overall, the whole debate of Intel versus AMD is stupid though. Some people want Ford and other's want Chevy. If the buyer is happy who cares? If I buy AMD and I'm happy with it for the 5 years I have it who cares if I could have bought Intel.

I will say that while AMD owns a small slice of the market compared to Intel, AMD systems seem to have more problems than Intels with compatibility of hardware with FreeBSD, CPU and board temp monitoring seem to often not work for AMD, and AMDs have had problems with downclocking.

It really is a personal preference and seeing what other people use and have problems with and avoiding those(or at least recognizing they don't matter to you). And no, I'm not here to start an Intel vs AMD flame war. Just mention things I've noticed in my browsing of the forums.

 

[TheSmoker]

I hate to bring this up but I am having issues doing hw monitoring on Intel branded boards with Intel CPU and FreeBSD as well :) just saying...


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

[cyberjock]

Notice that I said...

... AMD systems seem to have more problems than Intels with ...

And not that all problems have been with AMD and no Intel system has ever had a problem.

 

[John M. Długosz]

I see a lot of comments concerning the compatibility/support with FreeBSD. ZFS is in the Linux kernal now, right?

 

[jgreco]

It's also in Solaris. I'm not sure I'd want to run that either though.

 

[technobot]

Just wanted to post my unsolicited feedback here. To be honest, I wish I read this post before initially putting together the NAS.

I've posted my specs in the Hardware Compatibility thread but long story short it's a cheapo AMD system jgreco alluded to on the first page. Now for our purposes (me, the wife, and a small family of VMs) the system as built is fine.

However, you really do pay later. It was pointed out correctly the first thing I had to do was buy an add-on Intel NIC, adding $35 to the cost (so that motherboard for $50 was no longer such a great deal, was it?)

The cheap board only comes with a single PCI-E x16 slot, and a PCI-E x1 slot. So you can put in the M1015, and the Intel Desktop NIC. If you want to play with link aggregation etc... you'll have to forgo the HBA (my current situation). Getting the cheapest CPU I could find resulted in a CPU that's probably a little underpowered for my needs (we mostly use CIFS here... so the three cores don't help out much, should have gone for raw power... honestly should have just paid more instead of playing "how cheap can i make it NOW")

I used the economical server-grade hardware strategy with my ESXi box and am very happy with it. I'll be upgrading the FreeNAS to Supermicro X9SCM-iif for ECC but especially IPMI. The extra slots will house the M1015 and maybe another dual port NIC.

The current system will be repurposed as a media PC, which it is probably best suited for.

 

[cyberjock]

However, you really do pay later. It was pointed out correctly the first thing I had to do was buy an add-on Intel NIC, adding $35 to the cost (so that motherboard for $50 was no longer such a great deal, was it?)

The cheap board only comes with a single PCI-E x16 slot, and a PCI-E x1 slot. So you can put in the M1015, and the Intel Desktop NIC. If you want to play with link aggregation etc... you'll have to forgo the HBA (my current situation). Getting the cheapest CPU I could find resulted in a CPU that's probably a little underpowered for my needs (we mostly use CIFS here... so the three cores don't help out much, should have gone for raw power... honestly should have just paid more instead of playing "how cheap can i make it NOW")

I used the economical server-grade hardware strategy with my ESXi box and am very happy with it. I'll be upgrading the FreeNAS to Supermicro X9SCM-iif for ECC but especially IPMI. The extra slots will house the M1015 and maybe another dual port NIC.

The current system will be repurposed as a media PC, which it is probably best suited for.

I never recommend you go for the low power CPUs. You can pretty much expect that you will outgrow the CPU before the hardware is old enough to really warrant upgrading. I went with the E3-1230v2 and not one of the cheaper CPUs. I'm confident I'll get at least 4 years out of it, which is far better than most of those "green" CPUs will get.

But its not our money to burn. And its not our data that may get lost.

 

[technobot]

I was thinking about doing another Xeon (1230 V2 powers the ESXi, you guys are right it sips power), but had settled on the i3 3240.

After reading your post and some other related threads in the forum it looks like I'll go with another Xeon instead. Your logic is correct, pay more now and it will still be more than enough down the line. Complete opposite of the cheap AMD build (not even a year later, already regretting paying less)

 

[John M. Długosz]

Klox, odd that I can't see your post on this thread even though I was notified of it almost an hour ago.

Anyway,
L4500: Quite cheap considering all the fans that are included! I'm just worried that they won't be particularly quiet fans.

X10SLM-F and M1015: why not get the X10 variation that includes the SAS on-board? I'm getting this one which is cheaper than buying the separate card.

Pentium: I wondered if only the Xeon line supported ECC. I double-checked and found out that you're OK. OTOH, it indicates that it only goes up to DDR-1333 speed, not 1600. BTW, where did you buy memory? I spent a little more, for the Hynix brand that Supermicro has tested.

PSU: I swear by Seasonic. I'm getting the same one.

As for power: reading the specs on the WD Red drives, they need 5W each. Can't beat the price on that particular Seasonic model though, so keep that for your phase 1. Measure the power used, and add another PSU along with more drives if indicated.

 

[Klox]

I was just wondering where my post went too! Did it show up in your email? Do you mind quoting it if you do? I don't have a second copy heh.

Thanks for the feedback. I hadn't considered internal SAS in place of the PCIe HBA. That looks like a better option, thanks! I am guessing each of the SAS are SFF-8087, so I just need 1 or 2 SFF-8087 to 4x SATA and a bunch of breakout cables from the PSU? Thanks for the advice on the HDDs and PSU testing.

When I pulled the memory quote it was Wintec at newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820161555, but I guess it is unavailable now. I'll have to browse around again. I haven't ordered anything yet. I've just read doing three passes with memtest86 on all pieces is all but a guarantee that it will be fine for X number of years, so I was just going with cheap.

*edit* I noticed that the CPU only supported 1333 MHz, but figured the bios would handle using the 1600 MHz with a lower clock. The Wintec 1600 is sold out at $170, but the Wintec 1333 MHz is available at $160. ECC 16 GB. I might go with that option.