Suggested FreeNAS build

[samuelellis]

Hello everyone, I have been doing some reading and think that I have the right idea hardware wise for my build but could someone take a quick look over it. Sorry to ask as im sure you see this a million and one times

Motherboard/Processor - ASRock C2750D4I Mini ITX - Looking at this board it seems almost ideal, lots of SATA ports, ECC RAM compatable and the built in processor seems like it would be able to run freenas/couple of plex streams


Hard drive - From what I can gather as you cant extend vdev's its best to set it up first with multiple smaller drive using all your SATA ports and then when you need more space swap the drive out one at a time for bigger capacity drives and then extend the Vdev, is that right?

In that case i am thinking 8 4tb Western digital red drives - this would give me unformatted 32TB of space - In order to keep as much as possible i am thinking of using Raid Z1 - its not as safe as Raid Z2 but as i will have an offsite backup

RAM - from what i can gather it is good practice to go with 1GB ram per 1TB so 32Gb of Corsair RAM

Power supply - EVGA 1000 GQ - probably massivly overkill but with this many spindles to run its better to go too much than too little

Does this sound like a good plan?

Below is the costings for it - can anyone see a way to do it a bit cheaper - worth looking on ebay for an old server board and Xeon as i do have a PCI 8Port SATA card?

Motherboard - £389 - https://www.scan.co.uk/products/asr...iii-6gb-s-vga-2x-gbe-lan-1x-ipmi-lan-2x-usb-2

RAM - £384 - https://www.scan.co.uk/products/32g...l-10600-4rx4-4g-x-72-bit-8-bit-pre-fetch-135v

Power supply - £134 - https://www.cclonline.com/product/1...00-GQ-1000W-ATX-Modular-Power-Supply/PSU0969/

hard drive - £1122 - https://www.cclonline.com/product/1...nch-NAS-Desktop-Hard-Drive-Internal-/HDD2167/

 

[samuelellis]

Or use a 2nd user motherboard like a Supermicro X8DTN+-F that you can get online for about £80 and a couple of Intel Xeon E5506 2.13Ghz quad core processors for peanuts instead of the asrock board

 

[samuelellis]

Hey guys - wonder if anyone could shed any light on my proposed build ideas above, would i be better off going with something like the Supermicro X8DTN and a couple of Xeon E5506's or should i stick with my main plan of the Asrock C2740D4I?

 

[demon]

Hey guys - wonder if anyone could shed any light on my proposed build ideas above, would i be better off going with something like the Supermicro X8DTN and a couple of Xeon E5506's or should i stick with my main plan of the Asrock C2740D4I?

I had the C2750D4I, and I just recently had to RMA it due to the hardware watchdog issue that popped up recently. Apparently they're getting hard to find, and if that's the kind of workload you're looking at, you'd probably do just as well, if not better, with a C23x board and a Skylake/Kaby Lake i3 CPU. It may well actually be cheaper. Also, 1000W PSU for a build like that is probably huge overkill - go over the peak draw numbers for all your hardware. My current FreeNAS box (see signature) has a 450W SFX power supply, and has stupid amounts of overhead - you can have too much there, if your normal runtime draw takes you too far below the PSU's optimal efficiency range (20-80% for 80+ Gold rated PSUs).

I don't see you mention a case. If you're in the MicroATX range, a SuperMicro MicroATX C23x board, like the X11SSM-F, with a Skylake i3, like an i3-6100 or i3-6300 (depending on whether you want 3MB of 4MB of L3 cache) might do just as well, give you 8 SATA ports, save a bit of money, and give you more flexibility going forward. MiniITX is great and all, but it can be a bit limiting.

 

[Dave Speed]

I can't recommend ASRock. They are nice when they work, but appear to have problems with longevity. In my case, I have a brick after less than 2 months use (closer to one...). Do some searching for comments. The fact that NewEgg won't refund on them should tell you something.

On the plus side, I get to (attempt) to transfer zfs partitions between machines... NOthing like real-world experience.