Supermicro X11SSL-F and Pentium G5500 - Will it FreeNAS?

[MarcusW743]

Hi,

the NAS I'm going to build needs to live in my bedroom and therefore has to be very quiet. It'll never serve more than 1-2 users at the same time and will be equiped with two 4TB HDDs (mirrored).
Also it should be as cost-effective as possible while being safe (e.g. ECC Memory) and future-proof.

I think that, after multiple days and iterations of Hardware configs and reading the Hardware Guides, I finally have a good starting point for my first FreeNAS setup.
But I still do have some questions and would appreciate if somebody could verify that all of this is actually compatible and meets my requirements.

CPU: Intel Pentium G5500 (Mindfactory) (Specs) - 99,00 EUR
Mainboard: Supermicro MBD-X11SSL-F (Mindfactory) (Specs) - 175,97 EUR
RAM: Kingston 8GB DDR4-2400 ECC DIMM (Mindfactory) - 92,47 EUR
PSU: be-quiet 400W 80+ Gold (Mindfactory) - 58,03 EUR
Case: Nanoxia Deep Silence 4 (Mindfactory) - 61,83 EUR
HDDs: 2x 4TB WD RED (Mindfactory) - 2x 111,70 EUR = 223,40 EUR
10GbE: Pair of Mellanox ConnextX-2 (Ebay) - 69,90 EUR (already bought)
Boot-Stick: 16GB SanDisk USB 3.0 (Mindfactory) - 7,52 EUR
-> Total: 788,12 EUR

I decided to not use the recommended RAM from the verified list of the mainboard because they were nearly 50 EUR more expensive and very hard to get. But using Kingston memory instead shouldn't be an issue, right?
I know that the 400 watt PSU is probably a little bit over-powered but I want to make sure that it will still be powerful enough if all 6 drive bays will be filled one day. Also I hope that this power-supply will be silent enough to not keep me awake.

What do you think about this config? Have I missed something? Will it FreeNAS..?
Or do you know some other Mainboard+CPU config with comparable performance to save a buck?

Thank you in advance!
Marcus Wichelmann

 

[Mihalich]

CPU G5500 - Coffee Lake and MB X11SSL-F for Intel® 7th/6th Gen. (Kaby Lake, Skylake-S), maybe Intel Celeron 7th Gen. (G3950)
10GbE: Pair of Mellanox ConnextX-2 - it`s for home?? Your MB has Dual LAN with Intel® Ethernet Controller I210-AT, is that enough?

 

[MarcusW743]

Thank you for your reply!

CPU G5500 - Coffee Lake and MB X11SSL-F for Intel® 7th/6th Gen. (Kaby Lake, Skylake-S)

Ups, thank you! I didn't see that, I thought the G5500 would still be Kaby Lake.

maybe Intel Celeron 7th Gen. (G3950)

That one looks good. Do you think it'll be powerful enough to fully support FreeNAS? I don't plan on doing any transcoding for now.
It's hard to assess for me which kind of CPU is required to not be a bottle-neck for ZFS and the different transfer-protocols.

The Intel Pentium G4600 looks good, too. The clock speed is a little bit higher and it supports Hyper-Threading while being not that much more expensive than the Celeron you suggested (but still way cheeper than the G5500).
And I'll go with DDR4-2133 ECC RAM then.

10GbE: Pair of Mellanox ConnextX-2 - it`s for home?? Your MB has Dual LAN with Intel® Ethernet Controller I210-AT, is that enough?

I plan to directly attach my main Workstation to the NAS using a single Peer-to-Peer 10GBASE-T link to gain the maximum possible performance there and connect the NAS using an additional 1GBit-Link to my Router/VPN-Endpoint.
Let's say one 4TB WD Red had a sequential read performance of 160 MB/s, this would already result in 1,2 GBit/s and saturate a single Gigabit-Link. Because of some protocol overhead and maybe even a speed increase by the RAID1 it might be even more trafic.
Also I don't think I just could bond two Gigabit-LAN-Ports together. Of course I could use Link Aggregation, but that would not increase the maximum bandwith. The only advantage of having two ports there is redundancy (which is not that important in a home-setup).
Or how do you setup something like this?

Kind Regards, Marcus

 

[Mihalich]

Or G4620. The type of memory you need is DDR4-2400 ECC RAM, it`s a base frequency RAM for Kaby Lake.
Bottle-neck for ZFS is RAM, 8 GB is absolute minimum.
If you have already bought a network card, then there is nothing to discuss. I use LACP.
And I advise you to use SSD as boot devise, flash drives are not reliable

 

[MarcusW743]

Okay, I'll go with G4600/G4620 (depending on where I can get them) then.
You're right, DDR4-2400 makes sense, I'll choose that.

Doesn't FreeNAS boot into a RamDisk to not put too much stress on the boot drive? I've read that even the logs directory is mounted on RAM. Is an SSD really necessary then while keeping in mind that I only have 6 SATA ports?
Have you already made bad experiences with flash drives as FreeNAS boot drives or do you think it'd be worth a try?

And thank you very much for your time as of yet.
Having a second pair of eyes looking into the specs is very helpful sometimes.

 

[Mihalich]

Yes, I had a bad experience with flash drives as boot devices.
And you can install additional SATA controller.

 

[glauco]

My FreeNAS build sports an Intel G4560 CPU. It was super cheap at the time.
No problems with it, except Emby can't convert and stream 4K videos.

 

[MarcusW743]

My FreeNAS build sports an Intel G4560 CPU. It was super cheap at the time.
No problems with it, except Emby can't convert and stream 4K videos.

Thank you for that info. Given that the G4600 has an even a little bit higher clock speed I think it will be powerful enough.

You said it can't stream 4K videos, but it does handle 1080p..?

I bought the parts together with an G4600 now and wait anxiously for their arriving. :D

 

[glauco]

No problems with 1080p! :)