Suggestions on my new build

[niclas197]

Hey,

I plan on making my FreeNAS installation a little more future proof (currently using the HP Microserver) and I would like to hear your opinion before I purchase the components.

Code:

ASRock B75 Pro3 (LGA1155) Mainboard as it features 8 SATA Ports
74€

Intel Celeron G530 
40€

Scythe Mugen 2 Rev.B 2100 CPU cooler
35€

Sharkoon Tarea Case (holds 9x 5,25")
40€

3x Cooler Master Stacker(4x 3,5" to 3x 5,25")
each 25€

4x 4GB RAM DDR3-1333
60€

Sharkoon WPM600 (600Watts)
50€

This system will cost around 400€ and will hold up to 12 disks.
I currently have a 4 disk Raid-Z and plan on migrating that, and expanding in 4-disk Raid Z steps (so I will basically add another 4 disks and another 4 when I need them and use 3 separate Raid-Z configurations)

I'm not really sure about the Celeron and if it can handle 3 individual Raid-Z's and about the PSU. 600W may be a little over the top, but I'm not sure if this board supports delayed spin up and I don't want to risk it and since the NAS will only run about 1/4 of a day I think using a 600W psu is negligible?

What do you guys think?

 

[paleoN]

This system will cost around 400€ and will hold up to 12 disks.

I don't like motherboards with a 1 year warranty personally.

I like my case, SilverStone SST-KL04B, not surprisingly. It has 9 3.5" & 4 5.25" bays. You would need one Cooler Master Stacker to reach 12, actually 13.

I would consider a 2x 8GB RAM kit. It leaves you room for expansion.

600W is more than you need, but it should be. PSUs are most efficient in the middle, around half their max. Of course I don't obsess over power like some people do. There's this XFX Core Edition PRO550W 80+ bronze, possibly based off a SeaSonic PSU, also more than you need.

600W may be a little over the top, but I'm not sure if this board supports delayed spin up and I don't want to risk it and since the NAS will only run about 1/4 of a day I think using a 600W psu is negligible?

Agreed and see above.

 

[survive]

Hi niclas197,

here are my thoughts:

First, I'd ditch the aftermarket cooler and put the cash you were going to spend on it toward a proper Intel i3-2100.

Price out a Fractal Designs Define XL case. That will get you 10 HDD slots with the space to take one of your 4-drive bays.

See what sort of price you can get a Corsair VX430 PSU for.

I'm with paleoN on the board warranty.

-Will

 

[niclas197]

Thank you both for the advice.

Well, do you think an i3 will be necessary?
I'm not entirely sure but I believe everything purchased in the EU has to have a two-year warranty.

 

[cyberjock]

I built a system for a friend using an i3-530 with 16GB of RAM. Using the onboard video the computer would boot up and with no hard drives pull just 50watts idle and about 65 peak during bootup. When 16 hard drives were added plus the associated controller wattage was about 210 watts idle and 270 watts fully loaded. Honestly, if you have a spare 500 watt power supply, you'd be better off with that. Of course, if you think you'll be pulling out the power supply and reusing it someday for something else 50watts might be a little small.

 

[survive]

Hi niclas197

I don't know what the price difference is between the i3-2100 & the G530, but if you are looking to put out the cash for an aftermarket cooler I do think it would be better spent on more processor. Keep in mind the i3's run super-cool and the stock Intel cooler isn't bad at all. Another thing to keep in mind, CIFS is single threaded & loves Mhz, so the faster the proc you have the better your windows shares should run.

-Will

 

[StephenFry]

Excellent advice. If you want it futureproof, ditch the Celeron and keep 2 DIMM slots free.

The 600W is fine, in this case probably anything from 350W to infinity will work. A 400W PSU might even use *more* juice than a 600W, it just depends on where its sweet-spot is.

I believe the Stacker cases have a fan built-in, but for the drives in the master case, I'd throw in a couple nice 120mm fans for decent cooling of the drives. It's overkill, but better be safe than sorry I say. I like the cheapest Zalman 120mm fan - it's €6,- here locally and even comes with a resistor-cable to lower the fan's speed if you want to.

Also, I personally really don't like RAID-Z when it comes to big drives. I'm assuming you're going to purchase new drives and as such I'm guessing these are 2 or 3TB a piece. In that case, RAID-Z is tricky. But it all depends on how available your data must be and how good your backup strategy is.

 

[niclas197]

Well, I would always max out every spot with slow 120mm fans.

Could you elaborate as to why you would not use Raid-Z? Yes, I would probably buy 2TB drives (I currently have a existing 4x2TB Raid-Z)

 

[survive]

Hi niclas197,

I don't want to speak for StephenFry, but I am also not a big fan of raidz (RAID-5) for use with a lot of big drives...instead I use raidz2, for the double parity. There's nothing that's going to strees your storage system more than a resliver (rebuild) and with big (1+TB drives) the process will go for a long time and will expose any other weaknesses in the system in the most unpleasant manner you can imagine. It's a tough call to make when you are planning on a smaller number of drives in your pool.

Spend the money on a good case with good cooling, populate every spot available with a quality 120mm fan to keep the drives cool. Big fans are quiet and move a ton of air, which keeps you & the drives happy.

Same thing with the PSU. A smaller good quality PSU (Corsair, Antec or Seasonic) will most likely deliver more juice on startup than a monster watt off-brand, as well as being more efficient & running cooler.

Take a look at this thread:

http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?6273-PSU-sizing-for-home-file-server&highlight=power+supply

Post #4.

Check your prospective motherboard manual & see if there is an option for "spinup delay". It might be that you can set a few seconds worth of delay between each drive spinning up which will make the whole power-on concern much less of an issue.

-Will

 

[RichR]

Hi niclas197,

Check your prospective motherboard manual & see if there is an option for "spinup delay". It might be that you can set a few seconds worth of delay between each drive spinning up which will make the whole power-on concern much less of an issue.

-Will

If anyone ever finds a decent MB with BIOS staggered spin up PLEASE let me know...... I searched and found nothing. I'm currently using SuperMicro and really wish it had it.......

Rich

 

[StephenFry]

Could you elaborate as to why you would not use Raid-Z? Yes, I would probably buy 2TB drives (I currently have a existing 4x2TB Raid-Z)

survive pretty much said it. You might find this graph interesting:
http://i.imgur.com/risDI.png

'fail' means total, unrecoverable failure of the pool, so in the case of raid-z a second drive failure during resilvering.
Unfortunately I don't remember the exact type of drives in this simulation (the graph was made by simulating billions upon billions of raid systems).

However, whatever kind of drive was used to make that graph, the current drives are not going to be performing better, only worse. Do some math (or better, find a good site that does it for you!) on the likelihood of a 2TB or even 3TB drive having an unrecoverable error. You'll probably get scared. A bit.
It's just got to do with the size of the drives, not necessarily with a drop in the quality of the media. Byte for byte that's remained pretty constant.

Maybe I and some others here have seen too much data loss or have a slight tic for being very secure with our data because of professional 'indoctrination', but consider the price of a harddrive (even now with them somewhat elevated compared to a year ago) and ask yourself if that $100 or so in extra investment -or alternatively that extra 2TB loss in net pool capacity - is worth the trouble of a failed pool.

Could be that me and my fellow Z2 proponents are just lazy ;)

 

[niclas197]

:( now I am scared. Ignorance is a bliss.

Well, the problem is that I can't buy 12 drives or even 8 drives at once. And my current "backup strategy" (as in: relying on Raid-Z and Snapshots (I know, I know but this is far from important data)) doesn't make it very easy to migrate.

I will try my best :D

 

[cyberjock]

The issue is with the uncorrectable bit error probabilities. For instance, with the WD Green 3TB drives (WD30EZRX) the spec for the drives allows for a non-recoverable read error of <1x10^14. If you use the value of 1x10^14 that is approximately 1 error out of 90.94TB. Basically, if the drive was 90TB, you should expect an error somewhere on the disk.

Effectively, if you had 90TB worth of drives, you should EXPECT an error. As the drives age the drives will become less reliable and that error rate will begin to increase, exponentially. Eventually you will be in the realm of an error being "likely" and if you are running a RAID-Z you are looking at a pool that you will not be able to resilver. I am not sure what will happen if you have an unrecoverable error during resilvering. The pool may fail completely or the resilvering may fail, but regardless you will be upset for sure.

Realistically, you are playing with probability. How likely are you to win the lottery? How likely are you to have a single sector fail on the 3 good drives? There is no way to predict the failure likelyhood, only the calculated probability.

So, the real question is "How important is your data?". If you are okay with the likelihood that a single drive failure will cripple you then feel free to run RAID-Z. I remember someone gave a thumbrule years ago that said something along the lines of more than 4 drives equaling greater than 10TB had better have dual redundancy. This was strictly a probability determination. It was commented on many websites that because of these probabilities that the end of RAID-5 and RAID-Z as we know it was approaching because there wasn't exactly any redundancy if an second drive could be expect to have an error in the future.

This is one of the reasons why there is a RAID-Z3 that was developed beginning in 2009. As drive size continues to increase it will become a situation where having a 3rd parity will be necessary.

A friend that used RAID a few years ago had a problem with his array where a failing drive prevented rebuilding his array (RAID-5 with a drive that had failed completely). He had to buy another hard drive controller and hard drives and copy the data to the new array. This was expensive and he was very nervous because at any moment while he was coming up with the cash to afford all of these things another drive failing would have resulted in all of his data being lost.

 

[niclas197]

After reading all of this I searched my house for spare HDDs and asked a few friends and I am now in the process of copying ~6TB onto USB drives so that I can build a new 8 drive Raid-Z2 with my existing and 4 new drives.

I hope you're happy now :D

 

[cyberjock]

I'm happy only that you made a smart decision :). Trust me, it's better to bite the bullet now and do it right the first time than kick yourself later when you've lost your data.

As we used to say in the Navy.. "If you don't have time to do it right the first time, when will you have time to do it right the second time?"

 

[palmboy5]

Please be advised of the problem encountered in this thread:
http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?6117-SATA-controller-problem

Two of the SATA ports (the chipset itself only provides 6) on the motherboard you listed are provided by an ASMedia ASM1061 chip, according to the motherboard specs. And according to the thread I linked, that chip is not supported by FreeNAS. So you'd still end up with just 6 ports from the motherboard.

 

[ShaTR]

Hey niclas, is your rig up and running? Just wondering if everyone went ok using the B75 chipset?

 

[niclas197]

Hey niclas, is your rig up and running? Just wondering if everyone went ok using the B75 chipset?

Hey, I replied to this thread one week after I finished but somehow it got deleted (?)

I used the FreeNAS 8.2 Betas from the start since they support the ASM1061.
It really runs fine, I have no complaints whatsoever. The CPU hardly get's above 10% load and never over 40° even with the lowest setting of the cooler. I must say that I really enjoy the case especially because it only costed me like 30 bucks. It's not pretty but very well build and it serves it's purpose.
One small caveat is the noise-level. Although I set every fan (all 120mm) to the lowest setting it's not really quiet but TBH I don't know what I expected with 8 drives constantly running.

Software-wise I can't complain either. I basically use the default settings (just a little sysctl tweaking) and Raid-Z2 is freakin' fast! I have lost the file with my benchmarks and can't test now but it was way more than I expect and I achieve perfect wire-speed ~110 MB/s over AFP or SMB.

So to conclude: I'm happy!