BUILD SuperMicro X11 build hardware check

[rungekutta]

Please validate this build for me... For home use. Relatively light use but I want reliability and for the data to be stored safely (with backup on top of course).

SuperMicro X11SSM-F-O
Samsung 16GB DDR4 ECC 2133Mhz (M391A2K43BB1-CPB)
2x SuperMicro SuperDOM 16GB SATADOM
Intel Core i3-6100
3x WD Red 3TB
3x Seagate NAS 3TB
Seasonic G-450 450W
Fractal Design ARC Midi R2

The 6 disks will be configured in single vdev RAIDZ2.

Anything that sticks out / looks questionable...?

 

[Dice]

Welcome to the forums.
Looks solid to me.
Cheers /

 

[m0nkey_]

3x Seagate NAS 3TB

If these are the drives I think they are, they will fail very quickly. You might want to consider going all WD or HGST instead of the Seagate.

 

[rungekutta]

If these are the drives I think they are, they will fail very quickly. You might want to consider going all WD or HGST instead of the Seagate.

Scary. But no, these are model number ST3000VN000. The intention is to spread the risks (not going all-in WD Red and potentially all from the same batch) but evidently that approach could backfire too...

 

[Ericloewe]

Scary. But no, these are model number ST3000VN000. The intention is to spread the risks (not going all-in WD Red and potentially all from the same batch) but evidently that approach could backfire too...

Spreading out drives over batches and manufacturers is a bit of a dark art, with unknown benefits. I doubt it'll hurt, though.
In any case, having a burned-in spare on hand is much more important than trying to minimize the risk of ending up with a bad batch of drives (except, of course, for models with IBM Deathstar-like failure rates).

2x SuperMicro SuperDOM 16GB SATADOM

I know they're cute and directly powered and all, but don't you think a cheap SSD or two would be a better option? Last I checked, Supermicro DOMs easily paid for two low-end 120GB SanDisk SSDs - each.

Otherwise, everything looks good.

Hey @anodos - I've been thinking that the forum should have a seal of approval kinda thing. You're the guy with the graphics design sensibilities here, what do you think about a shark with thumbs up - too silly or just silly enough?

 

[Dice]

Hey @anodos - I've been thinking that the forum should have a seal of approval kinda thing. You're the guy with the graphics design sensibilities here, what do you think about a shark with thumbs up - too silly or just silly enough?

+1

 

[anodos]

Spreading out drives over batches and manufacturers is a bit of a dark art, with unknown benefits. I doubt it'll hurt, though.
In any case, having a burned-in spare on hand is much more important than trying to minimize the risk of ending up with a bad batch of drives (except, of course, for models with IBM Deathstar-like failure rates).


I know they're cute and directly powered and all, but don't you think a cheap SSD or two would be a better option? Last I checked, Supermicro DOMs easily paid for two low-end 120GB SanDisk SSDs - each.

Otherwise, everything looks good.

Hey @anodos - I've been thinking that the forum should have a seal of approval kinda thing. You're the guy with the graphics design sensibilities here, what do you think about a shark with thumbs up - too silly or just silly enough?

Only if it wears a leather jacket and looks like the Fonz.

 

[Ericloewe]

Only if it wears a leather jacket and looks like the Fonz.

Oh my, so a good FreeNAS build will have to jump the shark?

 

[rungekutta]

I know they're cute and directly powered and all, but don't you think a cheap SSD or two would be a better option? Last I checked, Supermicro DOMs easily paid for two low-end 120GB SanDisk SSDs - each.

They're not quite that expensive, but certainly more per GB, yes. However after browsing around a bit more it seems there's divided opinion on the true value of mirroring the boot disk... so I went single DOM instead, freeing up a SATA port for future use (ssd cache?). The mobo has total 8.

 

[Ericloewe]

oops, sorry for the dupes, web browser / proxy playing up.

That happens, I'll just report it for the mods to clean up. Feel free to report your own dupes to have them fixed, in the future.

They're not quite that expensive, but certainly more per GB, yes. However after browsing around a bit more it seems there's divided opinion on the true value of mirroring the boot disk... so I went single DOM instead, freeing up a SATA port for future use (ssd cache?). The mobo has total 8.

Yeah, mirrored DOMs/SSDs are overkill for most people.

 

[DeadlyDays]

I think you have good taste, the 6100 seems like it could handle quite a workload, if I wasn't going to try transcode/encoding things on it I'd have went for something without HT and lower clock.
I'm getting my MBD-X11SSA-F-O + i3-6100 + 2x MEM-DR416L-SL01-EU21 Saturday and I will be throwing Freenas 9.10 on it using an old SSD(or a flash drive). Finally decided to move from just lots of RAID 5 arrays in windows/Linux over to something a bit more reliable.
I have already have 5 x WD Red 3TB . I am probably going to wipe them and retransfer data over to them again from my external backup of media since I was running them on nonecc ram in a 2008 gaming rig that I can almost guarantee the RAM wasn't quite right.
The 6100 looks like a pretty sweet spot for the cost atm. Going to see if I can get emby/plex to transcode or re-encode using the igpu, if that works then this thing will be pretty beastly running 3.7Ghz with hyperthreading.
The only WD drives I've ever had fail are the Green drives and the AV-GP drives which were essentially green drives. But I've only been building my owns machines since 2008(and that black drive runs great still)

I actually went with the Silverstone Grandia case though, Easier to stack things on :) than a stand up case. Without a GPU you can fit a nice amount of disks in the removable hard drive cage(which when loaded with HDD's is HEAVY, but a nice steel handle on it for lugging around)

Too bad freenas 10 isn't out in release, I very much prefer the interface on that which I threw on the gaming rig I'm essentially testing it out on(because the marvell network controllers on that board fail after about 400GB of transfers on 9.10 and I have 4TB I wanted to move over)
Soon I'll have actually trustworthy storage for all that rare data I've collected!

I'll be using mine though moderately heavily as once I have more available storage I'll be running more torrents. I like collecting/distributing unlicensed materials, like independent works/unlicensed manga/etc, and also for media distribution on my home network. So we will see if it even stresses out. Is it wrong to retain copies of every version of Linux distributions? The more disks I buy the more I desire more of them, some people are into physical hoarding, I'm into data hoarding!
I often run out of sata ports on machines though(I have no boards atm with free sata ports at my house.....), is using a SYBA SI-PEX40071 just for more sata ports a bad thing? Should I segregate drives on that pci card to an unsafe pool of data or will the data be fine if the pci card fails?
Too bad superdom so expensive for so little or I'd pick some up, would save sata ports.

 

[rungekutta]

So I've now built this system and run some burn-in and performance tests. As above, except that I upgraded PSU to 550W and settled with single DOM for boot (no mirror).

I was wondering whether the smallest Skylake i3 would be enough - for my use it definitely is, I've never managed to load it more than 20-30% and that's when hammering it with transfers over SSH (i.e. scp).

For large continuous reads I easily saturate gigabit ethernet, with approx 120MB/s reads over SMB from a Windows 10 box. The CPU doesn't break a sweat. For large writes I get about 80MB/s (i.e. ~640Mbit/s). Also plenty enough.

With smaller files however, different story. When I backup my mail server including a sizeable Maildir/, write performance is about 1/20th or less compared to the above. Not quite so impressive any more, but I guess that's part of the package with RAIDZ2. I don't think I'm going to notice this in real use however as the NAS mostly will be reading and writing media content - videos and photos - where the photos are typically between 10 and 25MB. But let's see...

The GUI is nice and intuitive and I haven't had any problems whatsoever apart from
a) a single spontaneous reboot literally in the first hour of testing - not seen since and I've been hammering it hard for nearly a week
b) had to turn off local domain controller in the CIFS settings to get login to work from Windows 10 and when accessing the server by its NetBios name

Otherwise rock solid, and the FreeNAS web-GUI is functional and for the most part intuitive.

Very happy!